L'étable Fumé: Cul Sec's Orange Alcohol-Free Wine

There are bits of herb floating in the glass. This is L’étable Fumé, the orange one from Cul Sec. Nobody took the alcohol out of a wine to make it. The drink is built up from grape juice, with natural wine drinkers in mind. I tasted it with Fleur from de Fruitslagers in episode 8 of Sparks.

“What an unusual smell” was the first thing I said.

Four building blocks

The base is juice from organic Pecorino grapes, straight from the grape. The makers chose not to dealcoholise wine because, as Fleur put it, too much flavour gets lost along the way. She had never tasted Pecorino as juice herself. She only knew the grape as wine.

Three more parts go in. The first is water infusions, tea being the simplest example, made with dried herbs such as alfalfa and verbena. The second is a slow ferment on kombucha, with the skins and must added to draw out tannin. The third is tincture, an infusion on alcohol, because alcohol carries flavour differently from water.

They add that tincture drop by drop, up to a maximum of 0.5 percent alcohol. Fleur said the drink now sits at 0.4 percent or lower, enough to bring the volatile aromas back.

The light fizz doesn’t come from fermentation. The CO2 is added, for mouthfeel.

In the glass

Fleur adds dried herbs, pear, including pear aged in oak, and a funky undertone. The bitterness, she says, comes from gentian, a root. The Pecorino sets a touch of sweetness against it, though she wouldn’t call the drink sweet.

With food

Fleur likes it as an aperitif and sees plenty of restaurants pouring it that way, because it is firm in flavour. I picture it on a summer terrace. People often say they miss the alcohol in drinks like this; I didn’t miss it here.

What to watch for

Start with the bitterness. Fleur herself calls the drink firm, with a fair amount of bitter. If you want a soft, fruity glass, this is the wrong bottle.

The organic story is more nuanced than you might assume. The grapes are organic, but not everything in the bottle is, and the bottle carries no organic certification. Fleur explained that regenerative farmers often have no certificate, and that de Fruitslagers sometimes prefer a waste stream to an organic ingredient.

Fumé is in the name, but I never mentioned smoke in the recording. Smoke only came up with the red, Rouge en Voiture, for which Fleur says they use smoked peat.

I don’t know exactly what the floating bits are. Fleur thinks they are left over from the infusions, but she didn’t create the drinks and wouldn’t say for certain. The infusions are filtered, she said, but some of the dried herbs stays behind.

Check which bottle you are buying, too. I tasted an earlier version, made on Pecorino. For the 2025 cuvée, the Fruitslagers website lists other grapes: Viognier and Sauvignon from the Ardèche and Bacchus from Kitzingen. What’s on sale now may taste different from what I describe here.

I also tasted a single bottle, once, and didn’t put it next to other alcohol-free drinks.

Maker

Cul Sec, de Fruitslagers

Drink

L'étable Fumé, orange

Base

Juice from organic Pecorino grapes

Method

Water infusions, kombucha ferment on skins and must, tinctures

Bitterness

Gentian root

Alcohol

Maximum 0.5%; now 0.4% or lower, according to Fleur

Fizz

Added CO2

Certification

No organic certification; the grapes are organic

The price didn’t come up in the recording.

More information: fruitslagers.nl/culsec

Sources

• My own tasting note and conversation with Fleur from de Fruitslagers, Sparks ep. 8
• Cul Sec at de Fruitslagers, grapes of the 2025 cuvée: fruitslagers.nl/bedrijven/culsec