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The Lowdown:
Heaps Normal is moving beyond beer with High Hopes, a non-alcoholic prosecco 18 months in the making. For Man of Many co-founder Scott Purcell, who spent months off alcohol for medical reasons, this launch is personal.
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High Hopes non-alcoholic wine is Heaps Normal’s first drink beyond beer: a prosecco 18 months in the making, arriving as young Australians drink less than any generation before them. I spent months off the drink this year for medical reasons, so this one is personal.
Nobody warns you about the glass. When I had to stop drinking this year, months of it, doctor’s orders rather than discipline, I assumed the hard part would be missing the alcohol. It wasn’t. The hard part was the pause at a dinner table when the bottle comes around and your hand goes over the rim. The quick maths of who’s noticed. The question you can see forming two seats away, and the answer you’re not ready to hand over with the bread.
I didn’t want to make my health everyone else’s dinner-party topic. I wanted to hold something that belonged on the table, drink it, and get on with the night. For most of this year, the thing that let me do that came in a beer can. So when Heaps Normal announced its next act was a wine called High Hopes, I read the release more carefully than I’ve read any in a while.
The rise of Heaps Normal
To understand why a non-alcoholic prosecco counts as news, it helps to understand what Heaps Normal actually is, because “beer company” undersells it. Since launching Quiet XPA in 2020, the Sydney outfit has behaved less like a beverage brand and more like a scene. There’s an in-house label, Heaps Normal Records, a Marrickville venue called the Heaps Normal Health Club, and the occasional curveball like a breakfast stout built for people who wanted the ritual of a knock-off beer without the knock-on effects.
The bet, from day one, was that not drinking shouldn’t feel like sitting out. Five years on, that bet has made Heaps Normal the poster child for Australian non-alc, and High Hopes is the company’s way of doubling down. Heaps Normal calls it the most significant launch since its founding. It’s also the riskiest. Beer had craft culture to lean on. Wine has centuries of ceremony, lists that are hard to crack, and a non-alcoholic category with a reputation problem it mostly earned.
By Heaps Normal’s own telling, getting a bottle worth the swing took 18 months. Two tonnes of prosecco grapes. A stack of failed batches. A heatwave-riddled 3am drive to Adelaide. And a research partnership with the Australian Wine Research Institute, where Head of Wine Ned Brooks and co-founder Ben Holdstock, the brewer behind the brand’s beers, worked the problem alongside winemakers, bartenders and organic chemists.
“This all started with a pretty simple question: could a beer company create a non-alc wine that the best in the business would respect?” says Ben Holdstock, Heaps Normal co-founder. “The stubborn perception of non-alc wine is that it’s something of a consolation prize. It often feels like a choice that comes from a place of compromise and not desire. We wanted to rip that up completely.”
“There were plenty of failed batches until we landed on something worthy of the High Hopes moniker,” Holdstock says. “Our collaborators at the AWRI’s No-Low Wine Research Centre called it among the best non-alcoholic wines they had encountered.” That’s a collaborator’s verdict rather than an independent one, and mine will have to wait for the bottle. But as development stories in this category go, it’s an unusually serious one.
Why young Australians stopped drinking
High Hopes isn’t riding a seasonal trend. It’s arriving on a shift almost two decades in the making. In 2007, 39 per cent of Australians aged 14 to 17 didn’t drink at all. By 2019, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey, that figure had climbed to 73 per cent. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, abstention rose from 13.1 per cent to 21 per cent over the same period.
A 2025 Flinders University study that followed more than 23,000 people across two decades put the generational gap in starker terms: Gen Z is almost 20 times more likely to abstain from alcohol than Baby Boomers, even after adjusting for income and other socioeconomic factors. That’s not a Dry July blip. That’s the water table dropping.
You can see it in the market, too, where Gen Z and millennial women are reshaping Australia’s beer aisle. “Sober curious” went from a book title to a retail category inside a decade, and Heaps Normal spent those years becoming its house brand. What it hadn’t done, until now, was follow its drinkers to the occasions beer can’t cover.
What months off alcohol taught me
Here’s what the statistics don’t capture: the admin. Months without alcohol means every dinner, birthday and work event runs the same script. The empty hand. The familiar question. The explanation you don’t always feel like giving. None of it is dramatic, and all of it is tiring, which is precisely why it wears you down.
What I leaned on, more than I expected to, was having a drink that looked and felt legitimate. A Quiet XPA on the table bought me a whole night of being a normal person at dinner rather than a medical case study with a water glass. For months this year, that was sometimes the difference between showing up and finding an excuse.
But beer only gets you so far. Nobody toasts a wedding with a stout. Wine is the drink of occasions, the pour, the fizz, the clink of glasses, and occasions were exactly the nights I felt the gap most. A non-alcoholic prosecco that can hold its own wouldn’t be a novelty to me. It would fill the gap the beer never could.
What High Hopes non-alcoholic wine tastes like
Cards on the table: my bottle hasn’t arrived yet, so the tasting notes here are Heaps Normal’s rather than mine, and I’ll update this once I’ve had a glass in hand.
The brand describes High Hopes as drinking like a Brut-style prosecco. Pale lemon with a fine bead, citrus peel, lemon sorbet and green apple on the nose, then apples and pears with lemon blossom and jasmine on the palate, a creamy line of acidity and a dry finish. The description reads promisingly, the dry finish especially, but the verdict waits for the bottle.
“We deliberately developed a wine to be enjoyed with food, something versatile that can be enjoyed with anything from freshly shaved parma ham, mozzarella-filled arancini, pan-seared fish and, come summer, a dozen oysters and newspaper-wrapped fish and chips somewhere salty and warm,” says Ned Brooks, Heaps Normal Head of Wine.
The Health Club will also run it through lower-ABV spritzes, and everything about the positioning says aperitivo hour rather than cellar. For a sense of the field it’s entering, our guide to the best non-alcoholic wines covers the current contenders, and our sommelier’s guide to ordering wine is worth a read before you take a bottle to dinner.
High Hopes specs, price and availability
- Wine: High Hopes Prosecco by Heaps Normal
- Style: Non-alcoholic sparkling, described by the maker as Brut-style
- ABV: Less than 0.5%
- Bottle size: 750mL
- Price: $23
- Tasting notes (maker’s): Citrus peel, lemon sorbet and green apple on the nose; apple, pear, lemon blossom and jasmine on the palate; creamy acidity; dry finish
- Food pairing: Cured meats, mozzarella arancini, pan-seared fish, oysters, fish and chips
- Availability: Heaps Normal Health Club, Marrickville, selected independent retailers and restaurants across Australia, and direct from Heaps Normal’s website
The launch party lands at the Health Club on 7 August: free entry, Meow Meow & the Smackouts headlining with support from Saturn’s Angel and Triptychs, and a custom smash room where you’re invited to bring something that represents a negative in your life and destroy it. The campaign around it runs on what the brand calls “optimism as punk”: the debut single “Kicks” gets its video from director Madeleine Purdy, with a CD release through Heaps Normal Records. “We keep coming back to this idea of punk in 2026 as a defiant, rebellious optimism,” says Andy Miller, Heaps Normal CEO and co-founder.
As for me, I’ll settle for something smaller than a revolution. The next dinner at ours, there’ll be a bottle of High Hopes in the fridge, and when it comes around the table, my glass is staying right side up.
High Hopes non-alcoholic wine FAQs
High Hopes is a non-alcoholic prosecco made by Sydney drinks company Heaps Normal under a new brand of the same name, which the company describes as a subsidiary of Heaps Normal. It is Heaps Normal’s first wine and first drink beyond beer. Heaps Normal Head of Wine Ned Brooks led development with co-founder Ben Holdstock, in partnership with the Australian Wine Research Institute.
High Hopes contains less than 0.5 per cent alcohol by volume. It is marketed as non-alcoholic prosecco, but the stated alcohol content is not zero. Anyone who needs to avoid alcohol entirely should weigh that distinction before drinking it.
High Hopes costs $23 for a 750mL bottle. The non-alcoholic prosecco is available through Heaps Normal Health Club in Marrickville, along with selected independent retailers and restaurants across Australia. Availability may differ between individual retailers and venues.
Heaps Normal describes High Hopes as drinking like a Brut-style wine, with a pale lemon colour, fine bead, citrus peel, lemon sorbet, green apple, pear, and floral notes, finishing dry with creamy acidity. Man of Many had not tasted the wine before publication and will update this article after tasting.
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