Description
"We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy" - SMPSMYTH, 2026
Three years ago my wife got pregnant, we tried 10-15 different brands of non-alc red wine, all horrendous. Like, surprisingly bad.
Being the romantic entrepreneur that I am, I decided to figure out why they were all so bad to make one for her. Turns out they are all made through distillation, which is pretty much the process taking a normal bottle of red and taking the alcohol out. Then trying to fix it. Didn't make sense to me.
I thought that was silly, why not make it from the grape up? And in my naivety, I started emailing labs about creating a "wine-flavoured drink". I knew nothing about wine.
It's been 3 years since and I have worked with food innovation labs, global yeast producers, research institutes and a national brewery to get 80% of the way there, the last samples were the best non-alc red I have tried by a decent stretch.
But 80% isn't really good enough so I went back to drawing board, and started building swarms of AI agents that could go out and scour every corner of the academic internet to find papers that related to any of my previous formulation processes. Then crossed referenced those vast amounts of data against my previous trial data. I then started colliding fields that don't talk to each other. Perfumery taught me how to build aroma in layers instead of hoping it survives. Bioprocessing taught me how to control a ferment properly, and where to balance liquid viscosity. And all of a sudden, I had a new formula that needed testing.
I knew the final lab run would be expensive, and the whole journey has been bootstrapped, so I started booking meetings with CEO's of major, global wine companies. They were super interested in meeting because the general wine industry has been spending millions upon millions to solve this specific issue. >95% of them still using distillation. This is where it got a bit complicated.
The meetings themselves were tense. I'm not protected by patent, so if i give up info to these companies they could just reverse engineer my formula and I would be left with nothing. Yeah we sign NDA's, but I don't really trust that sometimes. So it would kinda just be them probing and me staying kinda silent with a smile. Sitting in front of an executive team, as a guy without wine experience, telling them the $10mil they just invested in distillation machinery may have been in vain is always going to be a sensitive convo.
So I knew I had to go and do this last part independently and fund it without them so that big business couldn't steal my idea. So I started working on an agreement with an independent lab in Adelaide at the Australian Wine Research Institute, running 2 X 200L wine trials for me starting this month. What I need to fund to make it happen:
- Facility time at a purpose-built wine research winery: two 200 litre ferments, finishing, sterile filtration and bottling.
- Winemaker time. A professional running the ferment day to day, plus the pre-trial planning and post-trial review.
- The fruit. Syrah juice, sourced and freighted to Adelaide.
- Bench trial samples for the finishing work: tannins, texture agents and the sweetness lever that make it drink like a red.
- Accredited lab analysis. The certified under 0.5% alcohol test that makes it legally non-alcoholic, plus sugar, chemistry and microbial stability.
- Freight of finished samples to tasters, winemakers and the industry people who've asked to try it.
- The provisional patent. Filing before anything else is disclosed, so the method stays mine.
- The first small commercial run if the trial lands.
The artwork was kindly donated by my talented mate, @Miboso. The vines have taken over the lab, with science and nature colliding together. The wine in the flask is alive. Nothing stripped out. Technology is not always against nature.
If this formulation works, the first limited production run will have a custom 6529 limited edition label and holders of this card will be eligible to redeem the physical package.
In a month or two, I'll know whether three years of work was worth it. If it isn't, I'll walk away knowing I have given this a serious crack. Thank you to anyone who supports it.