We live in the age of everything now: if a web page doesn’t load quickly enough, we abandon it; if our desktop processor isn’t efficient and fast, we immediately lose patience; if the apps on our smartphone don’t solve our problems in fractions of a second, we uninstall them or download others, hoping they’ll perform as well as we desire. In short, we demand speed always, everywhere, and in any case. Yet it’s not that long since we were complaining in line at the post office, but waiting our turn. However, time still has its value and proves useful in many situations.
This is true in viticulture and enology, whenever a major change occurs and a phase of “active” adaptation is necessary. Examples abound. Organic wines? The first ones on the market certainly paid the price of not being able to take advantage of certain techniques in the vineyard and cellar, but the average quality level has gradually risen. A similar argument could be made for so-called natural wines – or, if you will, “wines without” -which, originally entrenched in their imprecision and obvious flaws, have progressively benefited from the pursuit of a purity and precision that were initially lacking. And then there are the Piwi varieties, which appeared on our production scene relatively recently. Despite their detractors still actively trying to demolish them in terms of quality performance, they are growing in terms of cultivated areas and, above all, the average quality of the wines produced from them: this was confirmed by the jury members of the 5th edition of the Piwi Wine Festival held at the Edmund Mach Foundation last November 2025. This is thanks to a search for the best growing environments, of course, but also to the development, trial after trial, of ad hoc winemaking protocols, not “copied” from those used for varieties we’ve been familiar with for centuries. Will this also be the case for partially and fully dealcoholized wines? The signs are already there. First, there’s a clear awareness that the currently authorized dealcoholization techniques need to be refined, and perhaps combined, to increase the pleasantness of these products, limiting the loss of aromas and addressing some rough edges related, for example, to astringency in red wines. Second, but no less important, is the commitment of a large segment of the production world, with leading DOCs like Prosecco and Pinot Grigio Delle Venezie at the forefront, to developing supply chains dedicated to producing “naturally” low-alcohol products, without the need to resort to alcohol extraction.
For “new” to also be “good,” experimentation is needed, and this requires time, as well as intuition and critical thinking.
