Bolle Drinks is on a quest to “redefine” non-alcoholic wine. The UK-based business started marketing its alcohol-free wines last year, selling more than 50,000 bottles and is targeting 170,000 this year and around half a million in 2027.
It is no easy task. Interest in moderating consumption is rising but the market for non-alcoholic wine remains tiny, held back, observers say, by product quality.
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Making tasty non-alcoholic wines is difficult; the production process can leave some alcohol-free wines tasting watery or overly sweet.
Bolle Drinks, however, believes the way it makes wine can set it apart from the competition. It has secured listings in high-end restaurant outlets and specialist retailers in the US and the UK, with its wines pitched at price points from £25 to £50 ($34 to $68) in the UK, for example.
Just Drinks met with CEO Gary Read in London to hear how Bolle has fared so far, its growth ambitions and his views on the category and the competition.
Dean Best (DB): Have you got your own production?
Gary Read (GR): We use third parties depending on the variety. We use a winery in northern Germany and another one in Italy. We’re doing our first bottling in California. We’re making a California Cabernet Sauvignon. The way we make the wines is completely unique. The normal process for making a non-alcoholic wine is you start with a wine; you use a machine to take the alcohol out and then people will add various things to try to make it taste like wine. The problem on any of the de-alcoholisation technologies is when you take alcohol out, you don’t just lose the effect of alcohol but the alcohol itself actually bonds the aroma cells. You take the alcohol and you lose a lot of the aroma – and the aroma that you lose is actually the nice aroma. If you ever taste the wine right after it comes out of the de-alcoholisation machine, it’s very, very thin because the alcohol gives it structure. It doesn’t smell very good and it just doesn’t taste like it’s meant to.
DB: Not necessarily in your process but what is typically added back in?
GR: A lot of people will try to add sugar or glycerine to build up a mouthfeel again and putting sugar in will mask some of the flavour. We see people adding natural flavourings or natural aromas as well. We see people adding lemon juice. There’s another brand that adds sparkling water. We don’t believe in that. We believe we need to be authentic and, for the non-alcoholic wine category to be treated seriously it needs to have wine properties. You need to know how it’s made, what’s in it, where it comes from. I would argue we’re leading the world, actually. This [Chardonnay Reserve] is the only non-alcoholic wine 100%-sourced from Burgundy. This [Grand Reserve Blanc de Blancs] is the only lees-aged non-alcoholic wine. All of them are the only twice-fermented, non-alcoholic wines in the world.
DB: Why do you ferment them twice?
GR: That’s the absolute key to what we do. We take the wine that comes out of the de-alcoholisation machine and we blend more fresh grape juice with it and, with our yeast, back into the tanks for a second fermentation. That second fermentation is what’s building the flavour, the aroma and the structure. Everything you taste, when you taste Bolle, there’s nothing but fermented juice. We don’t add anything. The reason we can do that is because we’ve created our own varieties of the yeast strain that is used for wine fermentation, such that we can run that whole second fermentation.
DB: Are the yeast strains trademarked to Bolle?
GR: They are, yes, we are exclusive. The yeast strains have patents. We have patents filed, they were filed a couple years ago, they’re going through. We also have patents pending on the winemaking process because we are the only company that re-ferments dealcoholised wine and we have a patent pending on that as well.
DB: The market’s still small and, if producers want to attract consumers into the area and get more conventional, traditional wine drinkers interested, quality is going to have to rise.
GR: Absolutely and that’s what we’re all about, right? We’re all about pushing the quality bar. We consider these to be our ‘version one’ products because this is using our version one yeast. We have a version two already developed that we will start using a little bit later this year. We don’t believe in sitting still. We’ve not created the perfect non-alc wine yet. I mean, I think some of these are actually incredibly good but we’ve got to continue to innovate.
DB: What were your net sales and net profit in 2025?
GR: We won’t talk about revenue or profit. It was our first year trading and we sold over 50,000 bottles. Our target for this year is about 170,000 bottles. Then I think the target the year after hits about the half a million mark.
DB: What are you doing in the supply chain to support those efforts?
GR: We think of our business as like a three-by-three matrix, right? We think of the world divided into three regions – the United States, the UK and the rest of the world. The United States and UK were our initial focus. Within those regions, we do three things – wholesale distribution, we do direct to end-user businesses and we do consumer business as well. The US is a very distributor-led market. We have about eight or nine states where we have active distribution. We have Washington state, Oregon, California, Arizona, New York, Georgia. We’re adding more states, more distribution, every month.
The US is our biggest market. They buy in such volumes compared to the UK. The California market is the same size as the UK, roughly. We’ve approached the UK market differently and the difference is we found it harder to get distribution. I think it’s a little bit less of an adventurous market, a little bit less innovative, a little bit more traditional. You have to earn your stripes a little bit more.
DB: There’s so much commentary about how hard hospitality is here in the UK. Do you think that’s feeding into customers being risk-averse?
GR: A little bit but I think, I mean, I was not in this business at the time but people tell me about how distributors overbought gin, for instance, and then they got stuck with it. The other thing we found with the distributors in the UK is they’ve invested in some of the early non-alc products and they haven’t managed to move them. They will sell them once to the customer and they don’t come back because they’re not good quality. Repeat purchase is so important. The UK is more go to the customer first, win the listing with the customer, activate a number of those customers, get them working and then take those customers to a distributor because, then, you’ve got the interest of a distributor. The UK is a sort of bottom-up build, whereas the US is you go and convince the distributor and they do a big purchase up-front.
DB: What Bolle calls the ‘rest of the world’, where are you focusing?
GR: Rest of the world is, at the moment, mainly Europe. We have distributors in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Denmark, Belgium and Iceland. We make all of the wine in either Germany or Italy apart from the new ones [in Burgundy]. The US is the priority because of the scale. We’ve got a great foothold there, winning some fabulous listings in the US, winning great distribution.
DB: Was the California bottling sparked by the volatility around tariffs?
GR: No, actually, it was nothing to do with the tariffs. We wanted to make a high-quality red wine. One of the places for high-quality red wines is Napa Valley. We have a part-time winemaker on staff there, a full-time winemaker in Europe. Part of it for us is ‘Okay, if we can make there maybe we don’t have to ship everything all the way.’ Shipping from Europe to the West Coast is a timely and costly exercise. Ultimately, it would be great if we could make American wine in America and European wine in Europe.
DB: Are you seeing major distributors in the US looking to broaden their ranges of non-alc wines?
GR: Absolutely. Southern just announced a deal with the company that’s probably our biggest competitor from a price-point perspective – French Bloom. Southern just took that on in 22 states across the US. That’s a big deal. That’s a big investment for them to take it on across so many states.
DB: Are you looking for a similar type of deal? Have you got a number of US states you’d like Bolle to be in by this time next year?
GR: We would love to get to maybe about 25 this time next year. The key is the big ones we’re missing – Florida, Texas, Illinois, Colorado. Some of the smaller ones, they’re also great but, for me, right now, for instance, my priority is Florida. It’s a healthy market. It’s a drinking market. They love their wine. That’s how we judge the state. It’s not just by the size but also how much of a wine culture the state has.
DB: Is there any room for any new markets this year or next?
GR: Absolutely. We would love to get into Japan and Australia. They’re harvesting now in Australia, so maybe next year we may look to potentially [produce] in Australia. We’ve spoken to a number of Australian wineries. Some of the big ones actually have approached us. They’re trying to figure out how to make non-alc wine. The other thing we’re thinking about doing this year is to work with wineries to make non-alc, so their wine, their grapes, our process.
DB: So have a kind of B2B revenue stream, as it were?
GR: Absolutely. I’ve got a meeting next week with a winery in the UK. I reached out to one winery after tasting one of their sparklings and said ‘Have you made a non-alc?’ They said: ‘Well, we’ve thought about it but we’ve said unless we can make one of sufficient high quality, we’re not going to do it.’
DB: Have you got any B2B contracts signed?
GR: No, it’s more of a thought process for us.
DB: Bolle is focusing its wine on specialist retail and high-end restaurants. What would it take for you to approach a Waitrose or a Wegmans, say?
GR: It’s a great question. It’s something we think about and discuss a lot. What’s important for us is the product is presented in a manner that is equivalent to the premium nature of the product. These are £25 on the shelf. At the moment, if I go into Waitrose, I think the most expensive is £10. If we put a £25 product in there, it’s not selling. We don’t want it on the shelf next to a £3.50 product. It does better when it’s with other quality products. If Waitrose were to say they’d like to put us on the sparkling-wine shelf but just label it as a non-alcoholic, so you’re with a £30, £35, £40, similarly priced wines, that would be a really interesting proposition.
There’s a school of thought in the market – I don’t really have an opinion on it but I’ve heard a lot of people say it – that non-alc wines at the really low end will eventually just die because people will get fed up with the fact it is not good quality. I’ve heard a couple of people that actually own those brands saying we need to premiumise, we need to improve the quality of the product because we’re not confident that market is going to stay.
We’ve got to be in the right places because the Fat Duck or any of these other beautiful restaurants that carry our wine don’t want to see us in the wrong place.
We can’t just chase volume. In my opinion, if you just chase volume, then you dilute the brand and you dilute the brand before you’ve actually built the brand. We want this brand to be built with the world’s finest quality non-alcoholic wine. That’s what we’re trying to build the brand as.
DB: If a more mainstream retail move were to happen, would it be the US first?
GR: The US is a little bit different. You’ve got people like Total Wine & More in the US. They’re a massive retailer but they will carry quality right up there. It’s not low-end. They’ve got high-end.
We’re actually just going into Total Wine. We’re going into California, Texas and Florida. Our retail [price] in the US for the two sparklings is $39.99. That’s where they’ll start. They’ll do their case discounts. They’re putting us in 160 stores and we’ll see how it goes. The US is not so sensitive to those things. The UK, maybe because it’s a tighter market, is more sensitive to that. If the head sommelier is doing his weekly shop on a Saturday at his local Sainsbury’s or whatever and he sees our wine in there, he might say ‘I’m trying to sell that for £60 a bottle in my restaurant. I can’t have people seeing it on the shelf in here.’ It’s a tough one.
DB: You’ve invested in the business. How much has Bolle raised in external funding?
GR: We’ve raised about £800,000.
DB: Are you going to need more to hit those sales targets?
GR: We do need more fundraising, absolutely. Not necessarily to run the business but to make the wine. Already we’re having to make a lot of inventory because, when you take into account some of the size of the orders for the US, you can’t run out. We literally just started exploratory talks. Ideally, what we’d find is a partner that was more than money, so maybe a partner that’s already got distribution
DB: Someone in the trade, someone even strategic, like an LVMH?
GR: What LVMH did with French Bloom is genius in a way. They took a 30% stake, I think, but now French Bloom has access to Moët Hennessy distribution, the name and ‘Oh, we’ve got a Formula 1 sponsorship’, I wonder where that came from? If we could find a partner like that – French Bloom have a lot of things that we don’t have. They have access to great distribution; they have access to huge amounts of marketing and everything that comes with that.
When we win listings, we have to win based on the quality of the wines. Nothing else. We don’t have money to throw at customers. I mean, the listing fees that customers ask for – £60,000 to put your product into a restaurant chain, that’s a lot of money. When you’ve got a competitor, you have to understand where your strengths are and where are your weaknesses. We’re not going to out-market them and we’re not going to out-distribute them. We’ll work on all of those things. What we’re going to do? We’re going to out-quality them.
