Review: 2003/2004 Zeronimo Century Blend - The World's Only Non-Alcoholic Vintage Wine
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When Zeronimo first launched the world’s first 20-year old non-alcoholic wine called Century Blend it was revolutionary. That was 2025, but as with all good winemakers, Katja Bernegger and her husband Patrick Bayer decided they had the chance to iterate on their award-winning blend and try again to make it even better.
They’ve just released the new vintage of Zeronimo Century Blend and I have to say, it’s totally different from the first vintage - but that’s the point. Vintage wines are never completely consistent in taste, but very dependent on how they started life and how they aged and this shows even after dealcoholization.
“This second wine came out exactly as I was thinking it should be. The first vintage was a little bit different than I thought it would be, it was good, but different than I expected. This second vintage was much more what I was hoping for,” Beernegger explained.
The parent wine for the first Century Blend was a blend of blaufrankish, pinot noir and merlot from vineyards that are over 70 years old. Bernegger explained in this new wine the three varietals are still the same, but the blaufrankish amount is about 5% higher. It is also a blend of both the 2003 and 2004 vintage. The parent wine spent two years in new French Oak plus an additional 20 years of bottle aging in the Heribert Bayer cellar.
As with all the Zeronimo wines, the wine was dealcoholized using the Solos aroma recovery system which involves vacuum distillation followed by specialized aroma recovery.
Aroma
This non-alcoholic wine has the most fascinating aroma. The Century Blend walloped me with a highly concentrated, nostalgic scent of Sovereign Coronation grapes, the tiny blue table grapes I grew up eating in the Niagara Peninsula on my grandmother's farm. Rather than smelling young or like ‘grape juice’, it smells like those berries have just deeply condensed through two decades of aging. There are also notes of violet, oak and a little bit of earthiness and funk. You can really detect the aging in the aroma.
Taste
The first thing you’ll notice in the glass is that this wine is dry, but in that perfect way that an aged wine is dry. Some other non-alcoholic red wine producers try to manufacture dryness if it’s missing after dealcoholization, but it doesn’t always add the same finesse like real tannins. In Zeronimo, the tannins are soft and dusty from aging old-vine blaufränkisch rather than astringent.
There are secondary and tertiary notes of dark chocolate and cassis with a hint of truffle mushroom or forest floor.
I really love that it's dusty and juicy at the same time with a really nice vein of earthiness that is only found in old wines.
With the first Century Blend, in comparison to this one, the flavours really melded together and blended without any edges. This new vintage definitely has a more precise structure between the secondary and tertiary layers. As Bernegger says, “that’s a good thing! It means the wine hasn’t reached it’s total peak yet.”
Mouthfeel
This is a very elegant wine, more so than other non-alcoholic options because of the great harmony in flavour and structure that comes from aging.
Because this wine is so old, there’s a plush quality to the mouthfeel. The sharp edges from alcohol and acidity had probably softened quite a bit in the parent wine, and then with the removal of alcohol it created an even softer quality to the wine.
Medium length.
What to pair with Zeronimo Century Blend
I paired the last vintage of this wine with a tomato and beef ragu with big egg white noodles and it was absolutely a perfect pairing. I think this vintage would work with similar food as well, something slow cooked or braised that has umami but doesn’t need high acidity to break down.
Overall
This is definitely a wine for wine people and not the average every day consumer looking to cut back on alcohol. To appreciate this wine, you need to understand exactly what you’re drinking and have had experience sampling wines that have been lying down for a decade or more. I’m barely eligible in this category, by the way, as I had very few experiences prior to giving up alcohol that would count towards my expertise.
What’s really cool about this wine is that it leaves you curious to explore after every sip. You experience something you might recognize in one sip and then go back for more to see what it is. It’s quite fascinating and very different from any other non-alcoholic wine on the market.
This bottle is worth trying at least once to experience a world first (ok, a world second, but you know what I mean). One day, there might be lots of vintage non-alcoholic wines on the market, but for now, this is the only one!
How I rank wines (based on IWSC standards):
95 to 100 - An excellent drink with a great personality. An example that stands out among its peers
90 to 94 - An accomplished drink with considerable personality, character and complexity. A classic example of its style or variety.
85 to 89 - A perfectly well-made drink which provides an enjoyable drinking experience.
80 to 84 - An acceptable but simple drink, lacking distinction.
