Wines for Pregnancy in Denmark

Before moving to Denmark, our day jobs in California were in academia, but our shared passion was wine. Over time, we became garagistes, making several barrels each year, planting a backyard vineyard of Syrah and Grenache, and writing two books on the spirituality of wine drinking and winemaking. When we arrived in Denmark in the summer of 2025, we initially set out to discover good local wines—our favorites are here! Soon afterward, however, Amy became pregnant, and our attention shifted to 0.0% wines. Since then, we have tried more than forty of them, hoping to find some continuity with our previous life in wine.

Our conclusion is that the industry has not yet figured out how to reproduce the structure, depth, and complexity of full-octane wine—tellingly, none of the wines we tried had vintages or vineyard designations. Still, we found seven wines that were genuinely enjoyable and offered positive echoes of previous wines. We also discovered that winemakers generally use one of two strategies to make the inevitable deficiencies of alcohol-free wine less noticeable: they use white wine as the base and then retain some residual sweetness or they add bubbles. Six of the seven wines on our list fall into one of those categories. The single red wine that made the cut is passable, but only barely.

Two quick notes. First, all the wines considered here are trying to imitate traditional wine. There is another category of beverage that does not aim to taste like wine but instead seeks to reproduce the complexity of the drinking experience, such as the excellent Sparkling Tea brand. They are not included here but are interesting in their own right. Second, some “non-alcoholic” wines contain up to 0.5% alcohol, which appears to be the accepted limit for advertising a product as “alcohol-free.” Given the context of pregnancy, we did not include those wines either.