Raise a Glass: The Popularity of Nonalcoholic Drinks Is Marking a Shift in Drinking Culture

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, over a fifth of U.S. adults in 2019. 52% of drinkers are replacing alcohol with nonalcoholic beverages, . In 2022, data analytics firm Statista reported in the U.S.

accounted for over $496 billion in sales and is expected to grow nearly 4% every year.Such rapid expansion has led to bottle shops opening across the country.

The largest, Boisson, has six locations in New York, three in California and one coming soon in Florida, and there are similar shops in Pittsburgh, Denver, Chicago and Houston.Jess Selander, whose Pacific Northwest-based Jøyus wine launched in September 2021 and now lines shelves at most of these shops, says to have enough nonalcoholic options to fill an entire store is not something she thought she’d see in her lifetime.Sober for 17 years, she remembers a time when there was just one sparkling nonalcoholic wine in the U.S., and it was far too sweet. “I wanted something more dry that had a lot more of the wine characteristics to it,” she says. “And after trying to find something else for years, I was like, ‘I’m going to try and do this myself.’”Selander says when she began her quest eight years ago, she reached out to well over 100 people in the wine industry, but the response was overwhelmingly negative.“I was told over and over again, ‘Nobody wants that, there’s not a market for that,’” she says. “How the wine industry really feels about NA [nonalcoholic] wine and the [nonalcoholic] wine drinker is not very positive.”Though she eventually found a way to create products that tasted the way she wanted them to taste, she was instead of reinventing one that had already been created.“Wine has been around for thousands of years, and NA wine has not,” Selander says. “It’s so new, and we’ve had to invent.