IL Etait Une Foie

‘IL Etait Une Fois’

I do not think that I could have put this any better,´IL Etait Une Fois´ or ‘Once Upon a Time’ (Jqs.Selosse) … there was indeed wine, quaffable wine and then there was also good and great wine. We have all been there, and all we needed then and still do today is to find a useful good corkscrew to get the thing open. Alas, during this first week of 2026 I just read that a ´name´ in the wine business has put her corkscrew down, probably due to poor market conditions, after many years in the Fine Wine Trade, and left her highly lucrative job in the trade to go and push something called Non-alcoholic wine. A malapropism maybe of some weight if I have not heard of another one recently. Non-alcoholic wine does NOT, or should not actually exist, I would say. As usual just my opinion. It’s a boring figment of someone’s imagination, or as a Bo Jo would have put it once-up-a-time ´someone is peeing down the back of my neck and telling me that it´s raining´. Call Non-alcoholic wine something else for goodness sake, but just do not categorize it as a wine with no alcohol. If you call it a wine, then you are confusing a lot of people out there and also simply lying through your un-stained teeth. Boringly, the Universal definition of wine is that it is primarily an alcoholic ´beverage´ (awful word) made from the fermented juice of fresh grapes (yeast converts sugars in the grapes to alcohol and CO2) known for it’s diverse varieties and complex flavours from natural compounds. It is distinct from beer, spirits and non-alcoholic drinks. Hence if you where to remove the life force, alcohol, from wine it is no longer a wine. A bit like a human being? if you take out the human spirit and/or the soul of a human it is no longer called a human being. It’s an empty boring vessel of something that it was once-u-a-time. The chore has simply been transformed into another thing all together. Call it what you like, but be clear in this case not to piggy back on a product name, Wine, to squeeze the new product into the old market place that seriously today does not need this kind of waffle designed to devalue the real thing, in this case WINE. Wine has and always will have an amount of alcohol in the mix, 7% to 24% ABV has been known all over the world, thank goodness! To take the alcohol out of or not add it in the first place is fine but give it another name, call it Shmog, Splaag or Shplogg or just something else. I think there was a sparkling fruit drink, horrible as I sipped it once, called Shloer. They never pretended it to be a wine, it was simply a sparkling grape juice. What is relevant here, and not to get totally lost in my blurb ”you are what you eat but also you are what you drink” When wine is done well it is a true product of nature and a reflection of site. It is Nature’s way of rewarding us at the end of (or during) the day. ‘Engineered’ wine including these low or Non-alcohlic wines are not made by ‘nature’, they are made by man and his chemical laboratory. Also, just like food they are and can be ultra processed and far from good for you. I do not wish well on the non-alcoholic snake oil movement an inch of good will. Butter is still NOT butter when it is called margarine and visa versa, plastic bottled water is NOT natural.  Bottled spring water does not come from a spring and unpasteurized cheese is thank goodness NOT pasteurized cheese. They are two quite seperate beasts, but few pick up on this. Maybe I am going a little off point here, but please indulge me a little longer. Bread, commercially made and most, is not bread. It may look like and smell like bread but it´s ingredients are def. not. Honey made from that awful syrup flavored liquid is NOT Honey. We have generally fallen asleep on all of this in our busy little lives, well in my life time for sure, but in the good olde wine business we have good and very long memories. We can forgive, but we cannot forget. I think it has something to do with all of those beneficial vitamins and minerals that we drink daily in our good wine. The veggie-non-alcoholic snake oil sales people should stick to fruit juice, Coca Cola light? or other fizzy or non fizzy drinks if they do not want to drink normal wine, Champagne or other alcoholic drinks for that matter. But I have a small question for them. When they put their sun cream on before the beach, or they brush their teeth in the morning, do they seriously think they are not absorbing any alcohol into their system. Wine vinegar, Balsamic, BACH remedies (remember those?), shampoo all contain pure alcohol. No one produces a Non-alcoholic RESCUE remedy do they! So what is this all really about except for cashing in on a FAD (a short term craze), a bit like Veganism or Tobacco free cigarettes, the gymnasium, diesel fueled cars and other generic news that is purely fabricated to scare the hell out of you and me and think that we should all be paying more to live a better life and to pay for an invisible insurance policy that will make our lives happier, longer and more fulfilled. Pure piffall all of it. I recommend you grab yourself a good bottle of Claret, white Burgundy or even a chilled Austrian Gruner Veltliner, pull the cork and you will see what life is all about, please don´t let these Non-alchi-charlatans get the better of you.

Oddly enough, just this evening 07/01/2026, Mister Elton John, you know the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road fellow, has just announced with his partner David Squeamish that they are now marketing (selling?) a Champagne with ZERO alcohol in their fizz.  It is called Elton John Zero Blanc de Blancs, a reference to the drink’s pure Chardonnay base, and it´s position as an alcohol-free alternative to Champagne. It’s aparentley made using grapes from northern Italy, it  is ´´crafted´´ , as they like to say, in Germany which until now I did not know had become the world home for high-quality? no-alcoholic wine! It will be sold as Elton Zero for short. We are told that Mister John  is an ideal backer for the 0% brand, as he must be one of the best-known non-drinkers, following a well-publicized struggle with alcohol addiction, which ended in 1990, when he ditched the booze altogether for a life of sobriety. Also, a teetotaller is his husband of more than a decade and his partner for over 30 years, oh la la, David Furnish, who I am told gave up alcohol in 2014. I think he still nips a quickie or two from the hip flask now and then when nobody is around. However, quitting  or slwoign down the drinking has not diminished the pair’s love of entertaining. Lucky them! The problem was, as Furnish or Squeamish explains is that they felt that they had no suitably celebratory alternative to the Champagne they once enjoyed, nor an ideal 0% fizz for their abstaining guests.  Interesting bunch eh! It was this quandary that drove their urge to create a new drink. Furnish used to run a Champagne bar in Las Vegas of all places. “It really came from something we wanted and needed in our life and in our home,” he begins, before stating: “Both Elton and I are teetotal (and proud of it, it would seem), and we love to entertain.” Adding that such lavish hosting could be for friends or family, or connected to work, he says that there was no pre-existing non-alcoholic drink that “hit the same mark” as a high-end fizz, particularly when it comes to “celebratory moments the sort when you want to make a special toast”. Having been “lovers of Champagne”, Furnish admits that he and darling Elton “do get quite tired and bored of sparkling water” (try still then) and remember without any fondness “the old days when it was always Shloer [sparkling grape juice]”. It’s also apparent that they have been looking for something to suit their lifestyle for some time. “The whole process of de-alcoholising, such as reverse osmosis (wtf), seems to take away the real essence and spirit of sparkling drinks, and the ones I had tried were either way too sweet or they had a sort of tinny and metallic finish to them all´´

This 0% fizz is made from fermented grapes with a special type of bacteria that doesn’t produce alcohol (trans-genetic-flem no doubt), similar to the way kombucha (boring) is created. “Rather than taking something out from what was probably great to start with, this is building something up to be the very best it can be,” he says

Having tried the outcomes of such a process, “we were overjoyed and pleasantly surprised that it tastes as authentic and as close to the real thing as possible”, he comments, before stating: “In fact, it’s as good as the real thing, with all the joyful things you appreciate in a fine sparkling wine or Champagne.” Balderdash!! That’s not to suggest that Furnish and Elton were presented with a fait accompli in terms of the taste. As he tells me, they were both involved in the final drink’s style and nature, assessing samples until they found a product they wanted to back. “It had to pass muster for us in terms of something we would want to serve in our own home, and definitely, there is a distinctive and discernible difference in taste from building a beautiful sparkling wine from the ground up, rather than having something and taking stuff out of it, which sees you remove part of its soul, and then you have to add other things to try to compensate, it’s never quite the same.”

Having found a blend to their liking, Furnish told us that they decided to put Elton’s name to the final product, ?why not eh, something to serve at their parties. And it has an assured market within the couple’s events. “Without question we will use it, we do huge fundraising dinners such as our White Tie & Tiara Ball, or our Oscar Party in Los Angeles, where we have always felt that there is something missing; the sort of thing that you would serve at an event like that for somebody who doesn’t want to consume alcohol, but who wants to feel like they are part of the Champagne crowd.” My god this is so depressing!! Dear reader, sorry to furnish you with all of this but it is the new year, and the Trumpski who has never touched a drop of booze in his life and eats hamburgers daily (no knife & fork) seems to be a good expample of someone who needs to sit down quietly with a decent glass of Chianti and mull over recent proceedings.

In addition to Chateau Elton Don´t Cry for me Marge & Tina John, Furnish emphasises that the pair will drink it at home. “It’s something we will use personally,” (probably to clean the dogs teeth with) he says, before stressing that without these two uses, Elton would be unlikely to lend his name to the product. “Elton gets asked to put his name on a lot of things, and he’s very selective in what he does,” records Furnish. Indeed, Furnish can only name one other recent tie-up using Elton’s name, scented candles produced in partnership with Harry Slatkin. “He is one of the world’s best fragrance blenders, and Elton knows what he likes in a scented candle, and has worked with Harry to produce a candle that Elton is happy to put his name on, and they are burning the house down with one right now” (pls call 999 or 911 if you happen to be in L.A.).

Elton John Zero Blanc de Blancs

Designed for teetotal entertaining & having some fun! 

Now having given this some serious two seconds of thought dear reader, WWC SA will not be offering this nonsense product to anyone. But we have done some research on your behalf and also to help Reginald Kenneth Dwight (E.J.) with his sales of Zero in London, and  you can buy it, whilst stocks last, in the supermarket chain (just where it belongs) called Sainsbury. BON CHANCE!

And by complete coincidence, at an excellent Austrian wine tasting today, down here in Sin City, of the wines from Burgland´s Claus Preisinger. Some joker (not me) at the table planted a bottle of Pinot Noir in the line up. It had a commercial Pinotish nose but the palate was flat and had absolutely zero offering. It was odd, just like a dense liquid that I hasten to add, did not pass my Osophegus. And finally, just to be a real pain in the A … it still has a 0.5% ABV, so I am not sure if Elton, Squeamish and their chums will be knocking this one back any day now. Pobreceetoes!

E&OE