THE BEST NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINK FOR DRY JANUARY – CREATED BY A WINE SNOB
On a business trip to New York eight years ago, the wine writer Matthew Jukes made a discovery that could have been uncomfortable, he tells me: “I was doing a series of events for sommeliers, and they all told me that alcohol at lunchtime, and alcohol during the week, really, was dead. People were still drinking great wine, but only at the weekend. I thought, blimey, that’s not what it’s like in London. But I knew New York fashions make their way to us, so it was coming.”
For Jukes, a dynamo who seems to embody the dictum of Jack Welch, the legendary one-time chief executive of General Electric, “Change before you have to,” this didn’t represent a problem so much as an opportunity. Jukes still does lots of work with “great wine” – fine wine reports, consulting, events – but he has a new day job: his eponymous zero-alcohol drinks brand, whose existence was set in motion by that Manhattan trip.
We’re chatting among the stainless-steel surfaces and piles of cardboard boxes in a railway arch in Battersea, south London, where the drinks – which are based on cider vinegar flavoured with fruits and other botanicals – are now made. Jukes, who rides around London on a Triumph Tiger motorbike, is not half-hearted about anything. So it’s no surprise that Jukes Cordialities are already poured in Michelin-starred restaurants and found in smart hotel minibars all over the world, from the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris to Core by Clare Smyth in London. In February, Jukes Cordialities was selected as one of the Walpole British Luxury Brands of Tomorrow for 2024. It’s a mark of not only the level of refinement of the drinks but also of the economic might of the “no and low” movement, that the boutique champagne house Billecart-Salmon announced this year that it has bought a minority stake in the business.
The first prototype was cooked up in the Jukes family kitchen in Clapham after a trip to Waitrose. “The challenge I had was how to solve this problem [of creating a no/low drink] with a wine person’s brain?” says Jukes. “I’m not going to put my name on anything that isn’t really top from an aromatic perspective, from a palate perspective or a finish perspective.”
He was inspired by a recipe for haymaker’s punch – traditionally made by English farming families using the produce from their own land. “The drink would differ from farm to farm because you grew different things depending on your microclimate and your soil. That appealed to the wine side of me. It felt so romantic. Then I realised that a haymaker’s punch was the same as a shrub in North America, which I knew about from the process of cocktail making, and because non-alcoholic shrubs were enormous during Prohibition.”
When it came to cooking up his own, Jukes went into full experimental mode. Not only did he try out more than 200 different ingredients – roots, spices, fruits, vegetables and flowers – but he also experimented with ways of chopping them. Take the cucumber: “The wet section in the middle is totally useless,” he says. “But we love the glassy, pale green crunchy section, because it’s textural. And I love, of course, the dark green, super-bitter outside section; if you grind that between your teeth, it’s sensational.” Or pineapple: “The husk is much more interesting than the juicy bit of the pineapple, which is quite simplistic.” He tried out all manner of different vinegars.
Then he realised that, while heating the ingredients together might extract flavour quickly, the cold maceration technique he knew about from winemaking produced a much more delicate and detailed result, although it took a week rather than an hour or so.
The first, Jukes 6, is dark red and designed to express “all the tasting notes you might write for bordeaux or burgundy – it uses blackcurrants, blackberries, strawberries and raspberries. Then there’s beetroot, to give this earthiness, give it guy ropes; it’s not a children’s drink”. Jukes 6 also resembles a red wine in the glass; the whole range is designed so that anyone drinking them feels “part of the dance” with those around the table who are drinking actual wine.
Jukes 5 looks like a sauvignon blanc and is crisp and refreshing, with cucumber and grapefruit, among other flavours (each drink is made using about 20 ingredients, some of them too secret to appear on the label); Jukes 8, The Sparkling Rosé, is pale pink and made with pomegranate, melon and rhubarb. And so on. Not that these are faux wines; they are fully their own creatures, sold either in tiny bottles as concentrates to dilute to taste with water or soda, or effervescent and ready to drink in cans.
This is roughly the point in the story at which I expect that, for some readers, what I call “the Fever-Tree delusion” is kicking in. The Fever-Tree delusion is the notion – incubated by an awful lot of people – that they too could create a high-quality drink and, if only they could magically land on the right product, one day sell it for millions.
It’s really not as easy as it sounds. On the flavour side of things, Jukes is a professional palate, a perfectionist who buys his aftershave from Paris but insists on blending even that himself. He’s also a fast processor and one of the hardest-working, most energetic people I know. And I know a few. And, of course, when it comes to a project like this, creating the drink is the very least of it. There’s designing your kitchen with specialist machinery, and managing the building project to get it in place; there’s organising the design and packaging; finding distribution channels; marketing; scaling the business; raising capital; dealing with production deadlines, cash flow, shipping, regulations; selling the damn stuff…
I once interviewed a producer of English wine who was all over the spreadsheets but said in fatigued tones, “I never realised how much time I would spend walking between restaurants with a briefcase full of bottles.” Jukes, when I meet him, is just back from a two-day business trip to Switzerland.
What has been the steepest part of the learning curve? Aside, he says, from launching immediately before the pandemic, “Managing people. I work on my own. I’m used to doing things very fast, very accurately. So I picked people [to work with] who were almost out of the same cookie cutter.” One of them was able, when the pandemic closed all the restaurants that Jukes had just been sold to, to set up a website so that the drink could be bought directly by the public. Another of them is standing in the kitchen behind us, working on a batch of Jukes 8. All the drinks are made by hand; even the blackcurrants that go into Jukes 6 are pricked by hand (it helps flavour release), although not, I am relieved to hear, individually.
Christmas-wise, for those looking for a zero per cent drink, either because they want to remain clear-headed or in order to “zebra stripe” (that is, to alternate alcoholic and non-alcoholic over the course of an event), the man himself recommends Jukes 6 with smoked salmon blinis. “Jukes 1 and Jukes 6 are both stellar with turkey. More specifically, Jukes 1 loves sage-and-onion stuffing, roasted parsnips, caramelised carrots et cetera; while Jukes 6 loves pigs in blankets, chestnut-bacon-and-cranberry stuffing, and braised red cabbage with cider and apples.”
2024-12-17T19:04:31Z