Arguably one of the most common misconceptions in the world of wine terminology is around sweetness. You may hear friends say such things as “I don’t like jammy wines… they're too sweet for me!” or “I can’t drink fruity wines because the sugar makes my head pound in the morning!”. Unless your friends gravitate towards a bottle of Wild Vines (or others of the sort) these associations are just plain wrong.
Sure, there are a number of “wines” (if you can call them that!) that are injected with flavour and sugar to appease the fruit punch lover that likes to let loose. However, for anyone who avoids the two-buck-chuck like the rest of us, let’s get something straight: the majority of still wines are DRY! And here’s why…
The process of making alcohol is relatively simple. Making it good is whole other topic, but just making it, is fairly straight-forward. When you take juice, which contains sugar, and introduce yeast, either added or present naturally, and then cut off all oxygen, the yeast chooses to eat that sugar. The bi-product… alcohol. And that is the process of fermentation. We could get into all the other amazing things that happen throughout that process, and we likely will on another NAVIGATE, but for now it’s only important we know that almost all of the sugars within the juice are eaten by the yeast cells, leaving us with alcohol. The small amount of sugar that is in fact left within the wine is called RESIDUAL SUGAR, expressed as the number of grams per litre that remained after fermentation.
So why does everyone get it wrong? Why do most associate sweetness with the “fruitiness” of wine? Well, it’s not much more sophisticated than the fact that most of us grew up on things like Fruité or Welch’s, which are loaded with sugar, which emphasizes the fruity taste of said diabetes enablers. Sadly, those moments throughout our childhood have deceived our brains into the opposite as well, associating fruit with sugar, and not just the other way around. In fact, when tasting wine, our pallet is actually picking up on 5 different palate sensations: Sweetness, Acidity, Tannin, Alcohol, and Body. We’ll go into more detail on these 5 sensations in another NAVIGATE, but it’s important to know that we can be led to believe that a wine is “sweet” when the acidity in wine is low, but again, this is only a perceived sweetness.
Now, while we said most still wines are dry, there are certainly styles from around the world that like that touch, and sometimes even more, of sweetness. Icewine from Canada is an obvious one. Mountainous, colder-climate regions are also infamous for producing sweeter variations of Gewurztraminer and Riesling.
So where do we find the actual sweetness of wines? There are a couple ways. Many producers have started adding it to their labels (like us!), to their websites, or describing it in their write ups of the wine. The LCBO also makes it easy, as they list it on all of their labels in-store and through their app. While at times difficult to find through research, there’s one way to get pretty close… tasting.
One easy trick that you can try going forward is to identify the acidity of the wine first, before thinking about sweetness. If you taste more sour or tart flavours, or that the back of your mouth starts to salivate, the wine is likely higher in acid. So, if your second taste, where you focus on sweetness, does in fact taste a tad sweet on your tongue, then it’s likely higher in Residual Sugar (RS) and there’s no sense of false sweetness. The opposite will also be true, where lower acid wines, like many red wines, will not have much acidity to them. So, if you taste a bit of sweetness on the second sip, then it’s likely to be a false sweetness and you’re really just picking up on the freshness of the fruit. Not a fool-proof system, but any method that allows you to taste a bunch of wine, is a good one!
So, at your next get-together with friends, sitting at the bar, or when ordering from the Somm, try to avoid going straight to the topic of “I don’t like anything sweet”, because for the most part, that doesn’t help narrow things down all that much!