I'd love nothing more than to be able to drink without getting drunk. Being able to knock back a bottle of wine with dinner and then a second bottle after dinner without any side effects would be dream come true. I love the pleasurable effects of alcohol as much as the next person, but 4 times out of 5 I'm only after the flavor and being forced to stop drinking something that tastes awesome due to the effect it's about to have on me totally sucks.
> I love the pleasurable effects of alcohol as much as the next person, but 4 times out of 5 I'm only after the flavor
I wonder how much of your perception of the "awesome" flavor is skewed by the pleasurable effects of alcohol, though. Like, the more you drink, the happier you get, and the happier you are, the better everything tastes.
Right, so why would you want to waste good wine when everything tastes great? From experience, the more intoxicated I get, the lower my capacity for actually enjoying what I'm drinking is. The best time for tasting is your very first drink, all downhill from there.
I find almost the opposite. The first couple of glasses of beer or wine of the evening is almost always the one that tastes the best. At the end of a long evening of drinking things just taste less and more muted and I'm far more happy drinking 'less good' drinks than I would be at the beginning of the evening.
Flavor-wise they range from not very good to absolutely terrible, kind of defeating the whole purpose. Even the very best non-alcoholic wines are only marginally better than the very worst alcoholic wines.
The best non-alcoholic beers are, relatively speaking, better than non-alcoholic wine, but the selection is basically limited to fairly mundane German style lagers and even the best ones (Jever is probably the best I've tasted) are inferior to even most mass-produced lager.
Clausthaller (not the canned), Paulaner Helles and Hefe-Weiß, Erdinger Weiß, Lämmbrau, and Hacker Pschorr Helles are all very tasty tipples. Spaten Helles is wretched, and Löwenbrau Helles is surprisingly not too terrible, given the regular stuff is garbage.
The non-alcoholic Erdinger Weissbier is probably the best non-alcoholic beer I've tasted.
You need to get "into" it a little before you realize it actually does taste like beer, except without the alcohol, and how much part of the flavour alcohol actually is (even with the relatively low 5% ABV that most beers are).
Also, and this may differ per regulations where you are, but many "non-alcoholic" beers do in fact contain up to 0.5% alcohol (including the Erdinger Weizener). So you'd have to drink 10 of them to feel the buzz of one normal beer, but I'd expect by that time you'd be feeling something else, over the buzz from a single beer :-P
I've had extremely low alcohol wine that tastes pretty close to every other glass of wine I've had. (But then I'm someone who thinks most wine tastes the same.)
It's also not available at every bar/restaurant you go to. Shame though. If governments were serious about combating the abuse of alcohol they should make it mandatory (including on tap).
