French Bloom founder shortlisted for Wine Star Innovator award
Wine Enthusiast has named Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger a finalist for its 2026 Innovator of the Year, built on a Limoux estate devoted entirely to non-alcoholic wine.
Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger, founder of the non-alcoholic label French Bloom, is a finalist for Wine Enthusiast's 2026 Innovator of the Year award, the magazine confirmed this month.
The Wine Star Awards, now in their 27th year, reward figures across the drinks trade for winemaking, hospitality and business achievement. The Innovator category has historically gone to producers working in still and sparkling alcoholic wine, so Frerejean-Taittinger's nomination marks how far non-alcoholic wine has moved from the margins of the industry.
She founded French Bloom in 2019 with the model Constance Jablonski, after working as a director at the Michelin Guide. Her husband, Rodolphe Frerejean-Taittinger, from the Champagne family of the same name, runs the company as chief executive.
The essence of a great wine lies in its complexity, its depth, the emotions it arouses.
A vineyard built for zero alcohol
French Bloom says it is the first wine brand to own an estate dedicated exclusively to non-alcoholic production. The vineyard sits in the Coteaux Océanique area near Limoux, on high-altitude clay soils, and is farmed organically for Chardonnay.
The wine starts out as a conventional still base: grapes are harvested, pressed and fermented as normal. Alcohol is then removed under vacuum at low temperature, a method chosen because it protects the aroma compounds that heat would otherwise strip out, before the wine is carbonated and dosed to finish.
French Bloom says sales have doubled every year since launch. The brand now sells in more than 70 countries and appears on the wine lists of over 300 Michelin-starred restaurants, according to the company.
A category outgrowing its novelty tag
French Bloom became Formula 1's official non-alcoholic sparkling wine for the 2025 to 2035 seasons and struck a partnership with LVMH's Moët Hennessy in October 2024, giving the brand distribution reach that a small non-alcoholic label rarely gets. The nomination also lands in a year when traditional Champagne has been rethinking its own relationship with alcohol: producers raised the appellation's permitted ceiling to 15 percent for warmer, riper vintages.
"We founded French Bloom on the belief that the essence of a great wine lies in its complexity, its depth, the emotions it arouses," Frerejean-Taittinger said in a statement announcing the nomination.
The Wine Star Awards ceremony takes place as a black-tie gala in January 2027. A nomination guarantees nothing: French Bloom has already picked up World's Best Alcohol-Free Sparkling Wine three times, but the Innovator title has yet to go to anyone selling a wine without the alcohol in it.
