You will know the moment when it comes. The bottle starts its round, a hand tilts toward your glass, and you hear yourself say, lightly: not for me tonight.
Here is the short answer to what you drink instead — something that keeps wine's ceremony without its alcohol. Cold, deep-coloured, a little serious, poured into a proper glass at the right moment. The rest of this is why the ceremony matters more than the wine ever did, and how to keep it.
The wine was doing a job at the table
Let me start with some respect for the thing we're replacing, because the glass at a dinner table is not nothing.
Oxford researchers led by Robin Dunbar found that social drinkers have more friends they can depend on for support, and feel more engaged with their communities — drinking together, they argue, works the way laughter and singing do, an old technology for servicing and reinforcing our bonds [5]. Read it carefully, though, and it is a study of tables as much as of alcohol. A place you return to. A glass everyone raises at once. An evening deliberately kept open.
The round, the toast, the staying — that is the machinery of belonging. The wine was mostly the vehicle it arrived in.
Yours will not be the only glass without wine in it
And the vehicle, quietly, is being swapped out all over this city.
The share of Singaporeans who drink when socialising slipped from 78 to 74 per cent in four years, and among men aged 25 to 34 — the demographic every wine list was built for — regular drinking fell from 35 to 25 per cent [2]. Across Asia-Pacific, twice as many people now say they are drinking less than say they are drinking more [3]. The drinks world has done its arithmetic: no-alcohol volumes grew about 9 per cent last year, on their way to eighteen billion servings a year by 2029 [1].
Some of that is the S$30 cocktail [4]. Some of it is a 7am run that doesn't negotiate. Either way, the glass without wine in it has stopped being a statement. It's just a place setting now.
I learned the point of the table on Thursday nights
I did not come to this understanding gracefully, by the way. I learned it years ago, during my Wall Street stretch — of all places, at a Zen temple on Lexington Avenue.
Every Thursday evening the temple sat in meditation, and I would love to tell you I went for the stillness. I went because Thursday was newcomers' night, and newcomers meant introductions — I was, there is no other way to say it, networking my own meditation. Even my break had a KPI.
But after the sit, the newcomers stayed to talk. Warm cups, socks, small talk with nothing riding on it — and nothing in anyone's hand stronger than tea. It took me more Thursdays than I want to admit to notice what actually kept pulling me back, and it was not the contacts. A table, I learned, holds people perfectly well on its own. What fills the glass was never the load-bearing part.
What the glass still owes you
So when the wine went, years later, I knew exactly what had to stay. Four things, none of them alcohol.
It must open. The aperitif was never named for its liquor — the word descends from the Latin aperire, to open [8]. Something that uncaps at the table, that pours, that makes that small glugging announcement: the evening's hinge, turning.
It must have colour and weight — deep enough to catch the candlelight, served in a stemmed glass, because a stem says occasion the way a mug says Tuesday. It must taste grown-up: dry, tart, faintly bitter, built for sipping slowly rather than finishing. And it should carry a story, because the first minute of every dinner is two hands and a question, and the question might as well be "what is that?"
Singapore has already set this table
If that sounds like a lot to ask of a drink, the city is ahead of you.
At Seroja — one Michelin star, at Duo Galleria — S$148 buys a pairing with no alcohol in it, course by course: an infusion of chestnut, watercress and lotus root aged in apple wood; a pomegranate pour with mulberries and curry leaves [6]. That is wine-programme seriousness, minus the wine. Free Spirit, the country's first alcohol-free bottle shop, curates its shelves under a line I would happily frame — "Choosing to be alcohol-free is a celebration, not a compromise" [7]. And on Amoy Street, Fura builds its non-alcoholic list from upcycled surplus produce [2].
None of this is a workaround anymore. It is a scene, and it is a pleasure to order from.
What's in my glass
My own answer is simpler than a barrel-aged infusion, and it is pink.
At home, when the table is mine, I pour a Lalaland Model Glow into a wine glass: beetroot, pineapple and pear, cold-pressed, a ruby so deep it passes for Burgundy by candlelight. It opens with a click instead of a cork, it pours with weight, it catches the light — and somebody always asks what it is, which dissolves the evening's only awkward minute before it can form.
For years I assumed the wine was the off-switch — that a week could not end without something to end it. Then the wine left and the evenings kept opening, which is how I learned that switching off is a skill, not a substance. The stopping does the work. The pour just marks the hour it begins.
So let the bottle go around. Let your hand rest easy over the glass — then fill it with something chosen, cold, catching the candle, and stay exactly as late as you were always going to.
The word was right all along: an evening is a thing you open. It never said with what.
Jay Qin is a long-term guest columnist for The Slow Sunday Journal, and the founder of the 5:15 Club.
