A hundred and eighteen years of getting this right

In 1907, a German chemist named Carl Jung was working on a problem nobody had solved: how do you take the alcohol out of wine without destroying the wine?

Heat was the obvious answer and the wrong one. Alcohol boils at 78°C, but the aromatic compounds that make wine taste like wine are more fragile still — heat them and they leave first. What you get is sweetish liquid with a memory of grapes. That's how the category earned its reputation, and it kept it for most of a century.

Jung's answer was pressure. Lower it far enough and alcohol boils at around 30°C — cool enough that the aromatics survive. He patented it in Germany in 1908.

It is still the industry standard, worldwide, more than a century later. And Germany is still where it's done best.

We didn't want to make a substitute. Substitutes are what this category has been offering for a hundred years, and people can taste the apology in them.

So we went to where the method was invented and where the expertise still sits. EPIK is made in Germany, by people who have been refining this for generations rather than adding a NoLo line because the market grew.

Real wine first — grapes grown, pressed, fermented. The alcohol comes out afterwards. That order matters more than anything else on this page.

Our founders spent two decades working across cultures where not drinking is ordinary rather than exceptional. Where a host who couldn't accommodate a guest who doesn't drink simply wasn't hosting properly.

It's a reasonable standard. It's strange that it isn't the norm everywhere.

At most tables, someone isn't drinking — because they're pregnant, or driving, or on medication, or their faith doesn't include alcohol, or they're training, or they just don't feel like it. The usual options are water or something meant for children. That's not hospitality. It's an oversight everyone has agreed to stop noticing.

EPIK is for that table. Not a consolation. Something you'd be glad to be handed, in a glass that matches everyone else's, with no conversation attached.