Oddbird × RISE
What if we could make better wine by rethinking how it begins? Together with Swedish research institute RISE, we're exploring how the choice of yeast during fermentation can shape the aroma, texture and complexity of wine, even after the alcohol has been removed.
YEASTFIT is funded by Vinnova, Sweden's innovation agency, under the call Nyttja infrastrukturer för innovation inom Life Science (Diarienummer: 2026-02963). Oddbird International AB is the project coordinator and the research is carried out with RISE Processum AB. The project runs from November 2026 to May 2028.
There is a moment in making dealcoholized wine that almost nobody talks about.
The wine is grown, picked and fermented much like any other wine. Only at the end is the alcohol taken out. And alcohol, it turns out, does a lot of quiet work in a glass of wine – it carries aroma, it gives weight on the palate, it holds the whole thing together. Take it away and something must fill the space it leaves.
We have spent years getting better at that last step: choosing the right grapes, making the wine carefully, removing the alcohol as gently as we know how. But we kept coming back to the same thought. We were still making wine the way wine has always been made, and only then asking it to survive something it was never designed for.
So, we decided to start at the beginning instead.
Fermentation is the work of yeast. Different yeasts make different wines – that much has been known for a long time. What nobody has really looked at is which yeasts make wine that stays beautiful after the alcohol is removed. A yeast that shines in a glass of ordinary wine is not necessarily the one you want when the alcohol is on its way out. That is the question behind YEASTFIT.
Working with people who have the tools we don't.
Answering it properly means trying a lot of possibilities, carefully and side by side, which is more than our own cellar can do. So we are working with RISE Processum, a Swedish research institute with laboratories built for exactly this kind of work — many small fermentations running in parallel, measured precisely, compared fairly. The promising candidates then come back to us, to our research centre in Alsace, where they face the real test: we make the wine, we take the alcohol out, and we taste what is left.
What we hope to find.
A way of fermenting that gives alcohol-free wine more of what wine lovers actually miss, aroma, texture, the sense that something is there. We are being honest with ourselves about this: it is research, and research sometimes answers no. But if it answers yes, it changes how we make every bottle that follows. The project runs until spring 2028. We will share what we learn along the way.