A non-alcoholic beer brand from Marrickville has just spent eighteen months and two tonnes of prosecco grapes proving a point nobody asked them to prove.
There’s a version of this story where a non-alcoholic beer brand adds a wine to the lineup because the spreadsheet said to. New category, new shelf space, same logo stretched a little thinner. That is not this story.
Heaps Normal — the Sydney outfit that’s spent five years making sober-curious drinking feel less like a compromise and more like a lifestyle worth committing to — has just released High Hopes, a non-alcoholic prosecco, and with it, thrown down a challenge to an entire industry that mostly hasn’t been paying attention to them.
The pitch is almost embarrassingly simple. Could a beer company make a non-alc wine good enough that actual wine people — the ones with the lists, the palates, the reputations — would take it seriously? Not “impressive for what it is.” Seriously.
Getting there wasn’t simple at all. Try eighteen months, two tonnes of prosecco grapes, a research partnership with the Australian Wine Research Institute, and — because nothing worth doing skips the mythology — a 3am drive to Adelaide through a heatwave. Head of Wine Ned Brooks and co-founder Ben Holdstock (the same brain behind the brand’s award-winning beers) ran the project through a gauntlet of winemakers, bartenders and organic chemists before landing on something the AWRI’s No-Low Wine Research Centre called among the best non-alcoholic wines they’d encountered. Not the best non-alc wine. Among the best wines, full stop, that happen to have the alcohol removed from the equation.
“There are so many non-alc producers we deeply admire — and yet the
stubborn perception of non-alc wine is that it’s a consolation prize,” Holdstock says. “It often feels like a choice that comes from compromise, not desire. We wanted to rip that up completely.”
What’s actually in the bottle
High Hopes drinks like a proper Brut-style sparkling: pale lemon, a fine bead, a nose of citrus peel and green apple that opens into pear, lemon blossom and jasmine on the palate, with a creamy acidity that lands on a dry finish. It’s built for the same table as a plate of shaved parma and mozzarella arancini, or a dozen oysters eaten somewhere too hot and too salty to care about decorum. It’s $23 a bottle, live now at Heaps Normal Health Club in Marrickville and rolling out through independent bottle shops and restaurants nationally.
Optimism, but make it punk
The wine is the headline, but it’s not really the point. Heaps Normal has always sold a worldview alongside the drink, and High Hopes leans into it harder than anything the brand has done before: the idea that choosing optimism, on purpose, in a culture engineered to make you passive and cynical, is itself an act of rebellion.
That’s the logic behind commissioning director Madeleine Purdy (Radio Free Alice, Gordi, Body Type) to shoot a music video for “Kicks,” the debut single from Sydney punk outfit Meow Meow & the Smackouts — recorded entirely with independent collaborators, from Marrickville’s Golden Retriever Studio to mixer Antonia Gauci and mastering engineer Mikey Young. It’s also why there’s a CD single dropping through Heaps Normal Records, a genuinely strange and genuinely charming flex for a beverage company to pull.
“We keep coming back to this idea of punk in 2026 as a defiant, rebellious optimism,” says CEO and co-founder Andy Miller. “It felt incredibly punk to bring High Hopes into the world as a protest against settling for the status quo.”
High Hopes launches properly on 7 August at Heaps Normal Health Club — free entry, Meow Meow & the Smackouts headlining, with support from Saturn’s Angel and Triptychs. Bring an appetite for arancini and a willingness to have your assumptions about what “non-alcoholic” is supposed to taste like quietly dismantled.
