A spritz is a bitter-sweet orange drink with bubbles, served long over ice, and it is easy to see why people want an alcohol-free one. The trouble is that most home versions taste like orange squash with soda in it. The fix is not a better bottle. It is the proportions, and the order you pour them in.
The common spritz spec is three parts sparkling wine, two parts a bittersweet orange-red aperitif, and one part soda water. In millilitres that is 90, 60 and 30, poured into a chilled wine glass and topped with ice, with an orange slice to finish. It is the same ratio Difford's Guide lists, and Aperol's own serve is built on the same idea of wine, aperitif and a splash of soda.
Where specs differ, the difference is almost always how much aperitif goes in. More aperitif means more bitterness and more sweetness at once. More soda means a longer, lighter, fizzier drink. So the whole drink is really two dials: how bitter, and how long.
Chill the glass if you have room in the freezer. Pour the sparkling base, then the aperitif, then the soda, then fill the glass with ice and give it one slow lift with a spoon. Stirring hard knocks the bubbles out, and Difford's Guide likewise pours first and adds the ice after. Garnish with a slice of orange.
Use plenty of ice. A glass half full of ice melts fast and leaves a watery drink; a glass packed with ice stays cold and melts slowly. For a home glass of about 350 ml, the classic 180 ml of liquid plus ice fits well.
Alcohol carries flavour and gives a drink body. Take it out and the drink feels thinner and tastes sweeter, because nothing is pushing back against the sugar. Bitterness fills that gap, which is why a bittersweet aperitif does so much of the work here. If the drink tastes flat or sugary, the usual cure is not more aperitif but a cold, very fizzy soda and a squeeze of citrus or a splash of tonic for dryness.
Bitterness is what stops a sweet drink from being squash.
It also helps to know where the drink comes from. The spritz began in the Veneto region of Italy, where, as the story is usually told, Austrian soldiers in the early 1800s asked for their local wine to be diluted with a splash of water, from the German word spritzen. Aperol, the aperitif most associated with it, was created in Padua in 1919. The wine-aperitif-soda version we know today came later, and spec details vary, so treat 3-2-1 as a common starting point rather than a law.
A note on labels: rules differ by country, and a bottle sold as alcohol-free can still contain a trace. In some places it must be under 0.05% ABV, in others it can be under 0.5%. If you avoid alcohol completely, look for products marked 0.0% and read the label on every bottle, including the bitters. As with anything on this site, drink in moderation, and if you are pouring for guests, make the alcohol-free glass look as good as the rest.
Most of the quality in this drink is fizz, and fizz comes from cold, carbonated water. A home soda maker is the cheapest way to get a lot of it, and three things matter at any price. First, the water goes in as cold as you can get it, since cold water holds more gas. Second, check how easy it is to swap or refill the gas cylinder, because that is the ongoing cost. Third, check what the maker is meant for: most are made for plain water only, so add flavour afterwards in the glass and not in the machine. Check the manual, and use a bottle you can clean properly.