Let’s say you are watching the Food Network one day and the chef is making one of the most amazing recipes ever. As you watch carefully you notice the recipe calls for red wine but you don’t drink wine and don’t want to cook with alcohol. Well, I have a simple solution that could change everything and make that amazing recipe possible. Being that I don’t drink wine at all I cannot give a comparison review but I can tell you I love being Fre.
At last I am Fre. Fre from using over-salted cooking wine. Fre from only having two choices, red or white! Thanks to Sutter Home Winery I am now Fre to choose from a variety of non-alcoholic wines that better suit the recipes I am making. They have white, red, white zinfandel, chardonnay, merlot, brut and spumante.
I can hear you asking yourself, “how do they make alcohol free wine?” Well I have the answer to that. Rather, Sutter Home has the answer and I am going to repeat it. Taken directly from the Fre Wines website:
“Fre wines are the product of a breakthrough dealcoholization process called the spinning cone column. Developed in Australia, the spinning cone facilitates a two-step procedure for the separation and collection of a wine’s fragile aroma and flavor essences and the subsequent removal of its alcohol.
Wine is fed into the top of the spinning cone column (a vertical cylinder roughly 40″ in diameter and 13′ in height) and flows down over a series of alternating stationary and rotary metal cones. Centrifugal force transforms the wine into a thin liquid film, which is contacted by ascending nitrogen gas fed into the bottom of the cone.
The nitrogen acts as a carrier to extract the volatilized aroma and flavor compounds from the wine. These essences are then condensed, separated and safeguarded while the liquid is run through the cone again, at slightly higher temperatures, to remove the alcohol. Then they are reintroduced to the dealcoholized wine and blended with unfermented varietal grape juice to create a beverage with less than 0.5% alcohol. The spinning cone process is superior to other alcohol-removal systems, such as steam distillation and reverse osmosis (also known as membrane filtration), for two reasons. First, it protects the delicate aroma and flavor essences by removing them, at low temperatures, prior to alcohol removal. Both steam distillation and reverse osmosis are single-stage systems in which wine aromas and flavors are degraded through exposure to either the heat or high pressures employed to remove the alcohol. Second, the spinning cone, unlike reverse osmosis, does not concentrate the residual base liquid to the extent that it must be re-diluted with water.”
So, for all of you who don’t drink or want to cook with alcoholic wine, here is your chance to be Fre.
