Most of us in the developed world have ready access to a variety of alcohol free drinks if the goal isn’t to get buzzed.
For the taste? If I could get my favorite wines, Scotches and beers without the alcohol- WHILE retaining the exact same flavor- which I admit is likely impossible, I'd never go back.
Dunno about the GP, but I stopped "getting drunk" in my 20s
I love wine, I love the taste. But I don’t really know why I love the way it tastes.
Sure, there may be some flavors of non-alcoholic drinks out there, but there's a lot more types and flavors of alcohol out there for which there is no non-alcoholic equivalent.
These days, if I'm drinking anything that is alcoholic in any way, it's because of the flavor. I've never liked the feeling of loss of control that comes with being drunk. My only problem with drinking alcohol is that if you drink too much of it because you like the flavor, then you end up getting drunk.
Non-alcoholic beers are OK when compared to mass produced beers (NA Guinness for example is not a million miles from regular Guinness, if drunk cold). None of them can stand up to genuinely great beers. Non-alcoholic wines are way way behind, and way inferior to even cheap wines. NA gin tastes very little like gin if you drink it straight, but can be used to make some very nice non-alcoholic mixed drinks. In fact the only space making serious progress on non-alcoholic drinks is the cocktail space and there are many bars out there where their NA cocktails can comfortably hold their own against their alcoholic counterpart.
In the same way I drink coffee for the taste, decaf even is often not the same.
That's not the same issue here.
And when it comes to soft drink, I can actually taste the difference between the caffeinated stuff and decaf. My mom ran that double-blind test on me when I was younger, where I was not exactly a willing participant. When I proved to her that I could actually taste the difference, she stopped trying to run double blind experiments on me.
