30-06-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
The soaring popularity of this high-alcohol wine doesn't make any sense
The market reports are unequivocal: As Americans are drinking less, nonalcoholic and low-alcohol wines are skyrocketing in popularity. In fact, according to a leading analyst, these products were responsible for the only growth that the wine industry saw last year.
And so no one would have expected that the industry's biggest phenomenon in 2025 would be an explicitly high -alcohol wine. But that's exactly what XXL, a brand of fortified, flavored, 16% Moscato, has become.
XXL launched in 2023 and sold 85,000 cases, a modest showing for a brand with national chain-store aspirations. Last year, it grew to 1.8 million cases. This year, according to Marc Oliveira, CEO of parent company Tri-Vin Imports, it's on track to do more than 2.5 million.
Its success doesn't make any sense, and yet the numbers can't lie. XXL may be an early indication that nonalcoholic wines are not guaranteed the swiftly upward trajectory that some analysts have assured. Or it may simply be this moment's requisite counterpoint to the overarching impulse toward moderation. There will always be people who just want to get drunk, wellness culture be damned.
The way Oliveira tells it, he conceived of XXL as a rebellion. In 2023, he spoke on a panel at the wine trade show ProWein in Germany, where the rest of the panelists extolled low- and no-alcohol wines 'as being the future with the younger consumer and to save the industry,' he said. He bristled at the implication that every wine company should suddenly be following the same script, and he also sensed that the low-alcohol space was about to become very crowded.
'It's not innovation if 200 suppliers all rush in at once,' Oliveira said. Also, he thought most nonalcoholic wine was bad. If people keep trying nonalcoholic wines and they taste terrible, he figured, the category won't continue to grow.
Instead of following the advice he was hearing, Oliveira decided to do the opposite. 'Nobody's asking for high-alc. Nobody's asking for flavored wines,' he said. 'They thought we were crazy.' At the time, Tri-Vin, a Connecticut company that Oliveira's father founded in the 1980s, was steadily growing but had yet to have a breakout brand. Oliveira sensed this could be its chance.
The conference was in March. By August, Oliveira had product to sell, thanks to a supplier he'd found in Moldova. He launched with five flavors: blackberry, pineapple, mango, peach, and strawberry and grapes. The initial response from retailers was poor.
'Everyone was giving us the cold shoulder,' Oliveira said. 'We had some retailers tell us there will never be a day in which these wines will be sold in their stores.'
As XXL took off, however, many eventually placed an order.
These wines are not made so much as engineered. They begin with a base of Moscato, which is fortified with a neutral, grape-derived spirit (also known as brandy), then flavored and in some cases colored with caramel dye. Oliveira worked with 'an outside formula tasting lab' to develop the flavorings.
He zeroed in on the name 'XXL,' but the trademark was already taken, so he trademarked 'XXL Moscato.' There were several back-and-forths with the feds, who kept rejecting XXL's labels as noncompliant. There's now a redacted line on XXL's front labels, a reference to what Oliveira calls his 'battle scars.'
The magic alcohol-by-volume number, Oliveira discovered, was 16%, which is the highest that can legally be sold in grocery stores in every U.S. state. 'We realized other competitors would come after us,' he said. 'If they're going to try 17%, 18% to outdo us, we're going to shut them down, we're going to go as high as possible, end of story. So we went to 21%.' That would be the XXL Cali Extreme.
When the war in Ukraine blocked Tri-Vin's access to the port of Odessa, XXL had to leave Moldova. It's now produced in Spain, France and California, the latter at Fior di Sol Winery in Napa. This year XXL is debuting cans and the juicebox-like Tetra Paks, as well as its first sparkling wines.
This wouldn't be the first time that high-alcohol wine is trending. The late '90s and early aughts saw a surge in California Zinfandels, for one, that pushed past 16% and even 17%. Many consumers viewed the alcohol content as a proxy for quality: the bigger, the better.
The brazenness of XXL's branding, coupled with the shameless alcohol levels, calls to mind Four Loko, which originally combined booze with caffeine. (Four Loko got rid of the caffeine after the Food and Drug Administration raised health concerns.) The similarity isn't a coincidence. Like Four Loko, 'we're trying to be unique and bold,' Oliveira said. But hopefully with fewer cardiac events: 'I remember drinking (Four Loko) when it came out and thinking my heart was going to explode.'
XXL has become a fascination of TikTok creators, whose reviews are mostly enthusiastic while also observing that the drinks resemble liquor more than wine. As CrownMeCutie put it, 'It's like a wine margarita.'
The TikTokers may love it, but a recent tasting of several XXL bottles in the Chronicle newsroom produced near-universal revulsion. The drinks are arrestingly sweet, so syrupy and boozy and heavy that it feels like you're swigging Gran Marnier. The best of the lineup, reporters agreed, were the guava flavor ('I could see bianco vermouth vibes,' said restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan); the sparkling Moscato, which recalled Martinelli's sparkling cider; and the blackberry, which despite its cloying density gestured toward some acidity. The boldest of the bunch, the 21% Cali Extreme, doesn't have any fruit flavorings — one might say it is wine-flavored. Somehow, that only made the sweetness more conspicuous.
Oliveira is right that a lot of low- and no-alcohol wines taste disgusting. But the other extreme doesn't seem much better.
The question is which end of the spectrum will have the greater staying power.
Oliveira believes the growth of low-alcohol wines will ultimately be a blip: 'I think that people still want alcohol to be a part of their lives.'
