When mindful drinking became a thing, I was more than happy to try the many zero-alcohol beers on offer. And I’ve enjoyed seeing them improve over the last decade. There are some genuinely tasty alternatives to booze. But one product I’ve always avoided is the non-alcoholic wines. Purely because they’ve always been awful. Making a bottle good enough for a decent wine list has been a big challenge for the drinks industry. And no one has got it right so far. Yet Heaps Normal has decided to have a go anyway.
Five years after launching its first alcohol-free beer, the Sydney company has introduced High Hopes, its first-ever wine, and its “biggest release since day one”. It drew on three reference points: the Memphis Design Movement, the American new wave band Devo, and Barbara Kruger’s iconic work. All three, the brand argues, do “defiance through joy rather than aggression”. Or, as it puts it, “defiant optimism”.
First, though, someone had to make the wine. It “took 18 months, two tonnes of prosecco grapes, a 3am drive through a heatwave to Adelaide”, and a research partnership with the Australian Wine Research Institute, one of the leading centres for wine science anywhere.
How did they do it? The prosecco is fermented with rare yeast varieties that naturally die off in a low-ABV solution. The finished bottle comes in at less than 0.5% ABV. Winemakers, bartenders and organic chemists were all consulted along the way. The outcome, the brand says, surprised even the experts.
If it passed the taste test and wanted to make bold claims about being as good as the real thing, then its identity had to live up to the brag. “To be optimistic today often feels like a radical, quietly defiant choice,” says Heaps Normal’s chief brand officer Tim Snape. “There’s a rebelliousness to optimism now that we wanted to explore. We landed on a kind of DIY, punk pastiche that we feel encapsulates the idea that a really good non-alc wine could – and should – have a right to be seen in the same way as its boozier counterparts.”
As the visual foundation, lead designer Paul Tooth took Memphis, the Italian collective that debuted at Milan Design Week in the early 1980s and split the design world in two. But it’s not the version you’re picturing in your head. “We weren’t interested in Memphis’s 1980s kitsch connotations, but looked more at its use of colour as disruption and shape as statement,” he explains.
“You can see that in how the label literally uses this shattered, chaotic and disrupted graphic element.” It all plays out in acid yellow, sky blue, and bubblegum pink, with an up-pointing arrow logo and a squiggle print that looks like it’s been photocopied one too many times. Kruger, meanwhile, shaped the brand’s tone of voice. “High Hopes is inherently optimistic, and we lean into this with our tagline ‘Aim Higher’, but we never want the brand to feel trite,” says Tooth. “Kruger was able to take these sincere, weighty notions and, through colour, typography and contrast, charge them with a new and subverted energy.”
To introduce High Hopes to the world, Heaps Normal commissioned Sydney film director Madeleine Purdy (Radio Free Alice, Gordi, Body Type) to make a music video for the debut single, ‘Kicks’, by Sydney punk band Meow Meow & the Smackouts. Shot in a warehouse among pallets, forklift solos and blackletter lyric cards, it’s a scrappy, joyful campaign recorded entirely with independent partners: Marrickville’s Golden Retriever Studio, audio engineer Antonia Gauci (Kesha, Troye Sivan, DMAs) and producer Mikey Young.
There’s a printed zine to go with it, too. Plus a run of limited-edition merch, including a clock, an incense holder, and a set of baseball caps. And asked in the zine what the most punk thing a person could do in 2026 is, the band answers, “Eat your fruit and veggies”.
High Hopes is out now as a non-alcoholic prosecco, priced at $23 (around £12), and available from Heaps Normal’s Marrickville venue, the Heaps Normal Health Club, along with selected independent retailers and restaurants across Australia.
