I’m Sweet on this Wine...

And…….. WE’RE BACK!  Sorry for the long delay in getting a new blog up.  My wife gave me a beautiful new ukulele for my birthday and really I’ve just been playing that.  Seriously.  I’ve managed to put it down for now but I still have sandy beaches and fruity drinks in my head.  And I’d like to keep it fruity by discussing sweetness today.  Sweet can mean so much in wine.  Examples:

This wine is sweet – slang for awesome

This wine is sweet – adjective for sugary

I’m sweet on this wine – Idiom for love

Have some more wine my sweetness – noun for person

This wine has so much flippin’ sugar in it, it’s practically a sweet – noun for thing/candy

She sipped her wine sweetly – adverb for the manner in which she sipped it

As you can see from this little grammar lesson, sweetness is very important in wine.  But what does it mean in practical terms?  Well, when wine starts out it is grape juice, and the sugar level is very high.  A pretty common sugar level, or brix as we in the biz call it, is 24.  So if your grapes are 24 brix, that means that in that in every 100 grams of weight, 24 of those grams are sugar.  The remaining 76 grams is most likely water.  When those grapes are pressed, it makes a sugary solution.  When yeast is added, it consumes the sugar and converts it to alcohol.  If a wine is fermented to dryness, that means the yeast ate the sugar until it was basically gone and yeast have basically died of starvation.  Fermenting to dryness is common in your chardonnays and red wines.  Your sweet wines like Riesling and Muscat are usually fermented to dryness as well, but sugar is added back in after fermentation.  With your really sweet, high alcohol dessert wines, there is a lot of sugar present before fermentation, and the yeast will convert that until the alcohol produced is too much for them to survive and they die from drunkenness (not really).  They die, maybe from drunkenness or maybe not, with a lot of residual sugar leftover which is why those wines can be so sweet. 

It’s tough to know just how sweet a bottle of wine is from the label.  If you are buying sparkling wine it may be easier.  You’ve probably heard brut or extra brut, but don’t know what it means exactly.  What that indicates is the sweetness of the wine.  Here is the chart, along with the grams of residual sugar per liter and % sugar.

Extra Brut 0.6% or less, 3 grams or less

Brut  1.5%, 6 grams or less

Extra Dry 1.2% - 2.0%, 15 grams or less

Sec 1.7% - 3.5%, 20 grams or less

Demi-Sec 3.3%-5.0%, 50 grams or less

Doux 5.0% - 10%, 100 grams or less

And for a quick comparison of some common beverages

Coke – 120 grams sugar per liter

Sprite – 100 grams sugar per liter

Orange Soda – 150 grams sugar per liter

Orange Juice – 100 grams sugar per liter

Milk – 50 grams sugar per liter

From these numbers you can see that even the sweetest sparkling wines are no sweeter than some common beverages you would not describe as sweet.  A sweet white wine like Riesling often contains around 20 grams per liter of sugar, whereas a dry wine like chardonnay is usually between 3-8 grams per liter.  Most red wines are relatively dry, so their sugar levels are in the 3-8 grams per liter area as well. 

Sweetness and people’s perception of sweet varies greatly.  I have learned through many wine tasting and detecting classes that people do actually taste things differently.  If someone hates onions, it’s not because they are lame, it’s because their tongue is weird, i.e. unlike yours.  My Four Daughters associate, Patrick, will choose a Bartles and James over a beer every time.  He’s a self proclaimed daiquiri man.  It’s possible that his taste buds are just geared towards sweet.  Taste is a very personal thing.  Now that you are all armed with this information, I don’t want anyone to go out and act like a humongous jerk to anyone that says “I don’t like Riesling, it’s too sweet.”  I know you’ll want to come back at them with “Milk is twice as sweet as Riesling, you wiener” but you won’t, cause you know better.