Dry January: the non-alcoholic wine worth $15 is the one with bubbles. The red is grape juice at wine prices.

Short answer: the question is whether any non-alcoholic wine is worth wine money, and the answer is yes, for exactly one kind. Removing the alcohol strips the aroma and the weight that made wine taste like wine, and nothing in a bottle of de-alcoholized Pinot Noir has been found to put them back. Bubbles and acid can do the job alcohol did, which is why the sparkling ones are drinkable and the reds are not, and the people who buy them say so themselves: at Total Wine the alcohol-free sparklers run about 4.2 stars and the alcohol-free Cabernets about 2.9. Buy the $11 Cava with the alcohol taken out, cold, in a flute. Leave the $17 Pinot. And if you want to spend $39, French Bloom is the one bottle that justifies it, once.

What comes out with the alcohol

Every non-alcoholic wine starts as wine. Then the alcohol is removed, by one of three machines: a vacuum still that boils it off at 30 to 40 degrees Celsius, a spinning cone that strips the aromas first and the alcohol second and then puts the aromas back, or a membrane that filters the alcohol out with the water and returns the water. All three are clever, and all three lose the same things. The technical literature is blunt about it: the separation “is always accompanied by a greater or lesser loss of aroma,” the lightest and prettiest aromas go first, and the result shows “a very significant reduction in the body and fullness attribute.”

Translate that. Alcohol is not just the part that makes you tipsy. It is what carries smell to your nose, what gives wine its weight on the tongue, what balances the acid and the tannin. Take it out and a red wine is thin, sour and oddly sweet, because most producers add sugar or grape juice back to fill the hole, and the tannin that was fine against alcohol now scrapes against nothing. A still white is a little better. A sparkling wine is a different story.

Why the bubbles work

Carbon dioxide does for a sparkling wine what alcohol does for a still one. It carries the aroma up out of the glass, it gives the wine texture, it makes the acid feel bright instead of sour, and served cold in a narrow glass it gives you the ceremony, which is most of what people miss. The de-alcoholizers know this, which is why the best products in the category are nearly all sparkling, and the critics know it, which is why the one bottle that gets serious scores is a French sparkling wine from a company co-founded by a member of the Taittinger family: French Bloom’s Le Blanc, 93 points from Natalie MacLean, $39 from the producer. That is the price of real Champagne, and it tastes like a very good Crémant with the lights dimmed. For the one evening of the month you want to toast something, it earns the money. For a Tuesday it does not.

The stills have their defenders, and the honest ones hedge. When Wine Spectator ran the category, its taster found the Ariel Chardonnay and Cabernet “far and away the best” of the still wines, Fre next, and then wrote the sentence that matters: “serious wine drinkers may find de-alcoholized versions tough to swallow.” Best in category is not the same as good.

The buyers agree with the critics, which does not happen often. On Total Wine’s shelf this week, the alcohol-free sparkling wines carry customer ratings of 4.2 and 4.3 stars across hundreds of reviews; the alcohol-free Cabernets and Pinot Noirs sit at 2.9 to 3.3. Those are people who wanted to like them.

The label

The words are regulated and worth knowing. “Dealcoholized wine” or “alcohol-removed wine” must carry the statement “contains less than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume,” and may add “non-alcoholic”; a bottle may say “alcohol-free” only if no alcohol can be detected at all. Half a percent is about what a kombucha carries and nobody gets tipsy on it, but if you are avoiding alcohol entirely, for pregnancy or recovery, the words to look for are alcohol-free or 0.0, not non-alcoholic.

Then turn the bottle around and read the sugar. The body that came out with the alcohol usually went back in as sugar, and some of these carry more of it per glass than a soft drink. A dry one will say Brut or dry and will list a few grams per serving; a sweet one will not mention it.

What to buy

The category is growing fast, up 22 percent in a year to nearly a billion dollars across beer, wine and spirits, which means the shelf is crowded with new labels of no track record. These have one.

Rondel Zero Cava, $10.99. The one. A real Cava house, the alcohol removed from a real sparkling wine, 4.2 stars across 265 people at Total Wine, dry and cold and cheap enough to open on a Wednesday. This is the bottle Dry January was waiting for.

Almost Zero Sparkling Dry, $14.99, and St. Regis Brut, $15.99. The backups, both rated above 4.2. Buy whichever is in the store; do not drive across town for the other.

King Maui 0% Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, $11.99. The one still wine that works, because Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc was always more smell and acid than body, and smell and acid survive the machine better than anything else.

French Bloom Le Blanc, $39. For the toast. Once.

The reds. Leave them. The $14.99 Cabernet rated 2.9 and the $16.99 Pinot Noir rated 2.9 are the most expensive grape juice in the store, and the people who bought them are telling you so in the only language a shelf understands.

And if a month without alcohol has you reading every label in the aisle for the first time, photograph the ones that confuse you and ask me. I will tell you which bottle was a wine before the machine got to it and which was never going to be.