Piquette 101: Everything you need to know about this refreshing, low alcohol drink made from wine

In the autumn of 2023, the government of then British prime minister Rishi Sunak launched a slew of reforms to the British wine industry, described as being made possible by ‘freedoms outside of the EU’.

Among these was the legalisation of piquette, a light, often fruity, wine-like drink averaging around 5% alcohol, made by adding water to grape pomace (the solid residue left after grapes have been pressed for wine), sometimes with additional sugar or honey, and inducing a second fermentation.

So, following the first UK harvest of grapes that can be made into legal piquettes in 2024, is 2025 shaping up to be the country’s big piquette summer?

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Chequered past

As sustainable as it is easy to make, piquette is, however, not something you can easily find on the shelves, and it is little known outside certain wine circles, due partly to its relative scarcity and legal status.

Historically served to vineyard workers during harvest as a cheap thirst-quencher, there has been a perception that it’s a beverage not to be consumed beyond the vineyard. It has been illegal to sell piquette in France since 1907 and it remains illegal to produce across the EU due to concerns of oversaturation of the wine market.

Such are piquette’s associations with being a lower-tier subset of wine that in Italian, it’s known as acqua pazza (‘crazy water’). In France, to describe a wine as piquette is an even stronger term of abuse than the British ‘plonk’.

In 2008, a prominent Cahors winemaker took a local newspaper to court for describing his wines as ‘chemical piquette’.

And yet, despite Europe’s historical antipathy, there has been a shift. In 2020, the website jancisrobinson.com published a write-up titled ‘Piquette: a summer wine for everyone’, while one US publication described it as ‘the wine of summer 2021’.

Piquette has gained a degree of popularity in the US, where many makers of natural wine – most notably New York state’s Wild Arc Farm – began to produce it in the late 2010s. It has been a bumpy ride though.

Sales data show that demand in the US has declined significantly in the last few years, largely due to uneven quality putting drinkers off, with many American winemakers no longer producing them at all, or some opting to rebrand as ‘natural wine spritzer’, a more familiar category.

UK lobbying

The legalisation of piquette in the UK is in no small part down to the work of Adrian and Galia Pike of Westwell Wine Estates, near Ashford in Kent, and lawyer Dominic Buckwell, who pushed the UK government Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs for many years for the law change.

After its first attempt in 2019 (‘Pikette’) was halted by the Food Standards Agency, Westwell is set to release its first legal piquette this year (price and timing unconfirmed at the time of writing).

To Galia, the appeal of piquette lies in the ease with which it can be made and its sustainable nature – she describes it as an ‘affordable experiment’ that other British winemakers should all be considering.

For Sophie Evans, who works a 2ha site in Kent using biodynamic principles, piquette is a positive response to the huge amount of waste that occurs in wineries, as well as a much more affordable product to make, in light of the high costs of winemaking in the UK.

In a world in which the price of most English still wines is above £20 and sparkling above £30, piquette represents a significantly cheaper alternative.

If you can get to them before they sell out, Offbeat Wines’ Loose Juice, for example, goes for about £16/75cl (micro-beers.co.uk, 2023 bottling), while urban London-based producer Blackbook Winery’s Hello My Name Is sells for £15 (see boxout).

Piquette seems poised to fill a gap in the UK market in which English winemakers are struggling to appeal to a British public who spend on average £9 on a bottle, according to a 2023 poll commissioned by Lidl GB (and published in The Independent).

Raising awareness

A major challenge UK piquette producers face is a simple one: nobody who is not in the wine world knows what it is.

Comically, when the Pikes first made a Westwell piquette, in 2019 pre-legalisation, the Food Standards Agency told them that it needed to be marketed as an ‘aromatised grapebased drink’.

They did so, under the name Pikette, but, says Galia: ‘After some consideration, it was decided that the name “Pikette” was too similar to piquette and they changed their minds.

‘Happily it was a very small release and we sold most of it before it was recalled.’

This maps onto wider issues of how to get the public to try piquette. As a low-alcohol beverage, it aligns clearly with one of the few areas of growth in the alcohol industry, which makes its lack of pick-up by winemakers across the UK all the more surprising.

The difficulty of categorising piquette is definitely an issue. Evans notes that many of those who drink it are expecting a wine and are taken aback by how many piquettes taste more ‘beer-y’.

Daniel and Nicola Ham (pictured above), who previously made wine as Offbeat Wines and now produce under their own names near Salisbury in Wiltshire, released Loose Juice – a piquette made from a blend of Bacchus and Triomphe grapes – in 2023.

Daniel notes that while it was enjoyed in a wide range of settings, particularly as a food pairing, he felt the chance of it being a repeat purchase for consumers wasn’t high, partly because, in his opinion, piquette falls somewhere in the middle of the no-lo trend.

‘I’m not convinced that the middle ground is an easy sell,’ he says. Yet it’s not all doom and gloom for piquette marketing. At Astley Vineyard in Worcestershire, winemaker Chris Haywood has been making piquette since 2020 and notes that on vineyard tours, the majority of drinkers enjoy it.

Its Saint Vincent 2022 piquette is sold in 37.5cl, beer-style bottles for £4 each. Haywood notes that this format has proved successful as the smaller spend ‘really helps customers just to go out there and try it’.

The press release sent out by the UK government in 2023 argued that piquette would ‘open new income streams for wine producers’.

But in the view of Tim Wildman MW, who makes pét-nat – short for pétillant naturel, the traditional method in which still-fermenting wine is bottled to complete its single fermentation inside the bottle, thereby leaving it effervescent and often with yeast residues that give the wine a hazy appearance – in both Australia and the UK, this is hard to agree with as the UK finds itself entering what he calls its next phase: overproduction.

In 2023, which saw a bumper harvest, more than 20 million bottles of wine were produced, according to WineGB; in the same year, annual sales had risen to 8.8 million bottles, although Wildman notes that this kind of surplus has been around for a decade.

In his view, the nature of piquette as an offshoot of wine at a time when many are struggling to sell their main cuvées means that its appeal is limited.

Low-risk venture

Galia Pike contests this perspective, arguing that the fact that piquette is sustainable (pomace left over from grape-pressing would be disposed of anyway) means that it is ‘not a high-risk product’.

Blackbook’s Sergio Verrillo made a piquette in 2019 as an experiment to see if it could be made to a high level. Alongside other winemakers, such as Evans and Ham, he noted that the successful marketing of piquette largely stemmed from its use as a food and beverage pairing in restaurant spaces.

In his view, the UK is primed to catch on to piquette in a similar way to the US at the beginning of the late 2010s, and that it’s a case of waiting for the right kind of media pick-up, such as a spot on a weekend daytime programme like the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen to ‘propel it to the general public’.

For Daniel Ham, a potential pathway for piquette would be for larger British winemakers, such as Gusbourne or Chapel Down, to start making it, since they are financially able to take greater risks than many other producers.

Ham points to supermarket chain Marks & Spencer releasing an own-label English pét-nat in 2024 as a reflection of the way in which trending wines (and therefore potentially wine-like beverages such as piquette) can be embraced by the mainstream.

The uptake of piquette-making by British winemakers post-legalisation doesn’t appear to be seismic. But this doesn’t take away from the opportunity – just look at the huge growth in popularity in recent years of hard seltzers (simply carbonated flavoured water with alcohol, first popularised in the US).

The answer to the question: ‘Is 2025 the UK’s big piquette summer?’ appears nebulous.

At the moment, the question among winemakers still seems to be: ‘Is it a worthwhile opportunity?’

Could it be this summer that piquette gets the recognition that many feel it deserves, or next summer – or never?

Two piquettes to try

Astley, Saint Vincent 2022 (pictured below)

£4/37.5cl astleyvineyard.co.uk

Made from Kerner, Bacchus and Sauvignon Blanc, and described as ‘more vinous and intense than the last vintage’. Cloudy lemon with a light fizz akin to a lemon sherbet, it has strong yeasty notes akin to a craft IPA beer, alongside citrus notes of lemon and grapefruit.

The embodiment of the beer-wine crossover found in many piquettes, it has a creamy texture in the mouth, with apple and pear characters on the finish and the tartness often found in cider.

A seriously quaffable piquette that feels even lower than the abv on the bottle and is ideal for a hot day accompanied by anything being cooked on a barbecue.

Alcohol: 6%

Blackbook Winery, Hello My Name Is 2019

£15 Blackbook Winery, WoodWinters

Made from Pinot Noir. Plum red colour, with chalky mineral aromas and a background of elderflower syrup. To taste, almost akin to a diluted fruit drink with blackberry, blackcurrant and strawberry flavours.

It has a surprisingly high level of sweetness (Turkish delight, liquorice) that is pleasant but a little overwhelming when faced with 75cl.

Alcohol: 6%

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