The Interview: North America's love affair with Giesen With GM Richard O'Brien
/If you’ve been interested in the non-alcoholic wine category for even a short time, chances are you’ve run across the name Giesen Wines on your grocery store shelf or online store. In the ever growing market for mindful drinks, this New Zealand based brand has emerged as a dominant force in the non-alcoholic wine category, securing an impressive 12% market share in the U.S. still wine segment.
This success, according to Giesen’s head of operations Richard O’Brien, isn't accidental but rather the result of a deliberate, quality-first approach rooted in decades of winemaking expertise.
“We've been making premium New Zealand wine for more than 40 years. So, the Giesen brothers were some of the pioneers of the New Zealand wine industry. You've got to remember the New Zealand wine industry is only about 50 years old and we were established 42 years ago,” he explained.
Giesen didn’t start out with a goal to make 0% wines. In the mid 2010s, the New Zealand government created a program to encourage winemakers to develop lower alcohol wines in an effort to address consumer trends around moderation. Giesen jumped on board.
“We were making a 9% lower ABV sauvignon blanc…And one of these terms we kept hearing was this term of moderation. And that's really what started the light bulb moment - if this is happening now, what will it look like in ten years,” said O’Brien.
What transpired next was a bit of luck and a bit of forward-thinking. In 2019, using spinning cone technology to remove alcohol from liquid was cutting edge. Fortuitously for Giesen, a cone had just been brought to New Zealand and was open for contract business allowing Giesen to completely bypass older and less effective dealcoholization methods.
“We were able to trial that equipment to make 0% Marlborough sauvignon blanc. And what we learned was that it actually lended itself really well to being dealcoholized because it's such an aromatic and punchy and intense varietal to start with,” O’Brien explained.
In 2019, Giesen became one of the first traditional wineries in the world to invest in building their own small capacity spinning cone, allowing them to start producing dealcoholized wines alongside their traditional wines.
They still make that original Giesen 0% Sauvignon Blanc, and it’s truly a primer on how a good non-alcoholic wine should taste. It accurately reflects the parent varietal with bright acidity, a medium body and those telltale notes of grassy aromatics that made New Zealand whites infamous. This was followed by a rosé, a riesling, a sparkling and a merlot.
The demand for Giesen’s first wines happened a lot faster than they had predicted, and was so massive, the company outgrew their original spinning cone capacity within 18 months. O’Brien says it didn’t come without some struggles.
“We had to put in a purchase order for the next size up which was 10 times the size of the original one and that was probably another 18 months to get commissioned and operational. So we had some real challenges certainly through the first three or four years of being able to keep up with the demand.”
The difference between Giesen and a lot of other newer non-alcoholic wine producers is their focus on quality, producing everything in their own eco-system of vineyards and dealcoholization plant.
“It’s not just taking leftover grapes or finding some cheap bulk wine and dealcoholizing it and hoping that consumers won’t notice a difference. They do.”
“What we have found over the last five years is that the inputs for making these wines does make a tremendous difference,” said O’Brien, “so there's no compromise in terms of the sourcing of grapes or the winemaking process.”
He believes that consumers are extremely smart.
“It's not just taking leftover grapes or finding some cheap bulk wine and dealcoholizing it and hoping that consumers won't notice a difference. They do.”
Giesen now has six different non-alcoholic still and sparkling wines, plus a new line of bottled spritzes for the younger consumer market.
As for the future, O’Brien shared that the Giesen team is working on leveraging their single-vineyard wines with a potentially higher price point for a consumer in high-end on-premise settings.
“They're perfectly suited to that food matching type occasion and so that's where we're starting to look at that really premium end of the category,” he explained.
O’Brien says they have to keep on innovating as more and more people change the way they drink.
“You can see that in the statistics for the global wine industry. There's a continued decline in consumption…and there really is demand here for these types of products. The consumer is ready for a high quality non-alcoholic wine.”
In the U.S. you can find Giesen across the country at Total Wine and many local grocery stores. In Canada, Giesen is available at most non-alcoholic retail stores.
