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After my positive pregnancy test eight years ago, the first thing I did was buy an industrial quantity of the non-alcoholic aperitivo Crodino, which is something of a negroni dupe for bitters hounds. There are plenty of really good, alcohol-free cocktail options nowadays, and beer drinkers, too, are amply catered for in the non-alcoholic department – but what of wine?

I may sound like an old fart, but for me, at 41, the pleasure of drinking wine is more about a sense of occasion than the stuff’s mind-altering qualities. (Collagen and social inhibition, I have discovered, wane in tandem.) So the challenge for wine drinkers who aren’t drinking is to find a proxy to sip and enjoy in the same way. Something that comes in a wine bottle. Something you drink from a glass with a stem. Something that works with food. Something that isn’t Shloer.

There are, of course, lots of dealcoholised wines (in which the alcohol and, frankly, flavour is removed after fermentation), but, given that they’re made to cater to a growing cohort of people who are drinking less – that is, responding to a mass market need – I suspect many are made with cheap, intensively grown fruit. No, the kind of substitute I’m after is a drink designed to be good in its own right: not a wine tribute band, but a different act altogether.

Kombucha is a good example, made by adding a scoby (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) to a sweetened tea for a fermented but alcohol-free result. Ocado carries all three varieties from the excellent Real range (made with green, black and lapsang souchong, respectively), all of which are now on offer at £8 a bottle. Tea makes a good basis for a wine proxy for a trifecta of reasons: it has a savoury character, it combines well with other flavours (botanicals, say) and, importantly, it contains tannins – the polyphenols responsible for wine’s “grippy” mouthfeel. I love Substance/s’ light sparkling unfermented tea-based drinks, a collaboration between Provence-based winemakers Myrko Tépus and Nicolas de Groot, particularly the smoky, peppery Brume (see today’s picks), while my favourite discovery of recent years is from another winemaker, Romain des Grottes in Beaujolais, whose L’Antidote is an off-dry, biodynamic gamay grape juice infused with 15 herbs, apple and ginger, and which is a revelation for non-drinkers with a sense of occasion.

In fact, most good wine subs are sparkling, which is where new brand Feral from the Italian Dolomites stands apart. It uses juice from tuber roots (mostly beets) as a base to which lactic acid bacteria is added for a fermentation that doesn’t result in fizz. With gentle acidity, deep colour and full body, red wine drinkers will be pleasantly surprised by No3 and No4 (both made with red beet) alongside creamy pasta, charcuterie and cheese. Meanwhile, No1 (white beet, Sichuan pepper and hops) makes a zingy companion for vegetable dishes, fish and chicken. Shloer this definitely isn’t.

Five non-alcoholic alternatives to wine

No4 Feral £24 Passione Vino. A red wine proxy made with lactically fermented red beet juice.

Real dry slow-fermented sparkling tea £8 Ocado. Dry, zesty kombucha with a green tea base.

Substance/s Brume £18.35 Sip Wines. Smoky, woody and delicious – made with lapsang souchong tea.

L’Antidote £17.50 Shrine to the Vine. Gamay juice infused with 15 herbs. Yes, please.

Wild Idol £29.99 wildidol.com. Award-winning AF sparkling “wine” made with müller-thurgau grapes from Germany.