Manel Alías: "I hope we have a wide variety of non-alcoholic wines."

Have six years of being a correspondent in Moscow made you prefer kvass to wine?

— No, kvass never convinced me. I can drink it, but no... It's one of the things that immediately makes you see the cultural differences we have in gastronomy, too. It's strange to me that something so popular there is so unknown here, that it doesn't exist at all. I have a related anecdote about one time I went to pick up some friends at the airport and I sat in the front and the three friends sat in the back. The first thing they commented when we got out of the taxi was that the taxi driver was constantly drinking. It's true that he had a bottle the color of beer and was drinking it, and they immediately thought it was beer. I explained that what I was drinking was kvass, which has a maximum of 0.5% alcohol. I was there to stop what would have been another of these rumors. That's not to say there isn't an alcohol problem in Russia; it's there and it's very serious. But it's distorted from a distance.

How does wine get to Russia?

— Wine and beer culture arrived much later than here because vodka was the main drink. This is changing, and for some years now, every city has plenty of places where you can enjoy wine and beer regularly, especially foreign wine. I always traveled to Moscow with the maximum liter limit of wine allowed because the same bottle that costs 5 or 6 euros here would cost at least three times as much there. The wine produced, and in fact, what has been drunk for many generations since the days of the Soviet Union, is very sweet; it's a wine that people wouldn't like here.

If I'm not mistaken, drinking vodka in Russia can be frowned upon: is the same true for wine?

— I don't think so. Wine is a more social drink and entails fewer problems than vodka. It can, but not as much. The festive atmosphere we associate with mixed drinks in Catalonia isn't exactly the same in Russia. There, vodka has caused a lot of harm because it was something within families, drunk at home, alone, with people who have problems. Beer and wine are probably somewhere in between.

There is also the alternative of non-alcoholic wine.

— A few days ago, I came here to Petit Celler to ask for the best non-alcoholic wine they had. And I set up a panel on the program to talk about non-alcoholic wine. Because I see that what's already happening with beer, where there's been a brutally rapid change, hasn't yet reached wine. Then, at the panel I set up, they explained to me very clearly that making good non-alcoholic wines is much more complicated than making good non-alcoholic beer. Because it's one thing to go from 5% to 0.5%, and another to extract the alcohol from a beverage that's 14% alcohol. But I think it's very necessary.

Because?

— Although I've enjoyed wine a lot, and will continue to enjoy it a lot, the current change is good. Wine is very good, but it has dangers. On the other hand, if we went straight to wine without alcohol, we'd have fewer dangers. And, in fact, we could say that alcohol-free wine doesn't exist yet. They call it must. I'm trying all the alcohol-free wines to find a good one.

You do a nighttime show. Is nighttime always the time to have a drink?

— I struggle every night when I get home to avoid having a glass of wine: not because I have a problem, but because it's always tempting for me, because I know I have little sleep because I get home so late from work and want to take the kid to school in the morning. I struggle to come home and put on an episode of a series or talk for a bit very easily. We haven't gotten out of control.

You have a son in his teens, and although he now lives in Catalonia, he grew up in Russia. How do you teach him how to relate to the wine he'll soon encounter as a potential consumer?

— I'm very lucky because, from what he's seen in Russia, he's made a clean slate with alcohol. He even tells me he never wants to try it again. And I tell him not to, because I don't think any of us ever liked our first sip of alcohol. Just as no one can ever have liked their first puff. And, on the other hand, you really like your thousandth. Since alcohol has many more bad things than good, if you never try it, all the better. I'm not saying I'm a life geek, but I see that with the young people coming up today, this has already changed a lot. And I think they have fun in a different way. Obviously, their generation has worse things than mine, but this one is clearly much better. So, with this, it's not hard for me.