Netherlands

The Dutch don't have a wine culture in the traditional sense. The climate doesn't allow it. But that absence created something interesting — a generation of food and drink makers who approached the question of what to put in a glass without any orthodoxy to protect.
In 2023, low-alcohol and alcohol-free beverages made up nearly 20% of total drink sales in the Netherlands — one of the highest rates in Europe. The demand for complex, gastronomic alternatives to wine is real and growing. And the people responding to it aren't beverage corporations. They're makers with a background in circular food, fermentation, and foraging — people who think about flavour the way winemakers think about terroir.
The result is some of the most original non-alcoholic drinks being made anywhere right now.

Fruitslagers

Fruitslagers

Dutch foragers turning oyster shells, wild herbs, and organic grapes into Cul Sec — a non-alcoholic wine alternative built from the landscape up, not stripped down from wine.

Fruitslagers call themselves squatters of the food system. Their base is a farm in Culemborg, in the Netherlands, where their shared production space — the Voedselstation — is a factory without a boss. Circular food producers work side by side, share machines, and figure out together how to make food production more logical.

Every product starts from a problem or an irritation. The team travels to grape farmers, food forests, and salt marshes. They forage, ferment, and work head to tail — every part of every harvest ends up in something. Nothing goes to waste, because everything has a flavor worth keeping.

Cul Sec is their newest brand, and the thinking behind it is the same as everything else: start from the landscape, not the bottle. They were looking for a grown-up, non-alcoholic alternative that wasn't sweet — something fermented, aged, and blended the way natural wine is made, but built from scratch. Oyster shells for mineral depth. Oak recycled from old wine barrels for tannin. Organic grapes from farmers choosing healthy soil. Wild herbs grown with regenerative farmers across the Netherlands.

No outside investors. No supermarket deals. Just vegetables, wild herbs, and a network of farmers they've been building for years. The landscape is the capital.