Archive: Around Town

Based on sales, it’s evident that wine drinkers who live in the Finger Lakes region like to drink semi-sweet or sweet wines.  I, on the other hand, prefer dry wines. This makes me wonder…how many people really understand what these adjectives mean?  So much of wine talk is difficult to understand.

I sometimes feel that so-called authorities in the business of growing grapes and producing and marketing wines want to keep it that way.  Do they think that if they create and maintain a mystique about wine that they can charge more for it?  Well here comes a simple, and I hope clear, explanation of what makes a wine 'dry', 'semi-sweet' or 'sweet'.

To understand these words we should consider the term 'residual sugar'.  If you know how much residual sugar is in the wine you already have an excellent indicator for estimating if you might like a wine without actually tasting it.  The average person begins to detect sweetness in a wine when the residual sugar is about 1% by weight. The term 'dry' is usually applied to wine when the level of residual sugar is 1.0% or less.

Residual sugars in sweet wines usually range from 5-15%. 'Semi-dry' is a relative term used to describe wines that are sweeter than bone dry and dryer than very sweet.

'Late Harvest' and 'Ice Wines' are made from grapes from which the water content has been reduced thereby concentrating the sugar. You might notice that the bottles used for Late Harvest wines are smaller than the standard 750ML and are more expensive.  That’s because, without the normal quantity of water, it takes many more grapes to create the same amount of wine and making this wine is more labor intensive. To make ice wines, vintners wait for a frost, venture into the vineyards in the early morning, and harvest the grapes that have shriveled from the cold.  It can be daunting and painful work and some vintners have been known to cut corners by harvesting grapes in pleasant weather and freezing them for later use.  I’m even aware of a few wine makers who dump 50-pound bags of sugar into the wine when no one is looking.

At the outset of the wine making process, yeast is added to grape juice.  There are many different types of yeast, each of which gives a unique characteristic to the finished product. Yeast convert the naturally occurring sugars of the ripe grapes into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When the alcohol reaches a level of about 12% the yeast die, fermentation ends, and a dry wine results. The most efficient way to produce a sweeter wine is to either use overripe, very sweet fruit or to stop the fermentation process before it has completed converting all the sugar to alcohol.

One of the reasons many people think central or northern New York State wine makers make better whites than reds is that the shorter growing season doesn’t allow enough time and direct sunlight for the red grapes to develop large amounts of sugar.

You might have heard of 'the noble rot.' It’s a term used to describe a mold, Botrytis cinerea, that can affect grapes during periods of alternating high and low humidity. Some vintners deliberately introduce it to their grapes because the Botrytis penetrates the grapes leaving tiny holes through which water evaporates so the sugar concentrates. French growers often use this process to produce Sauternes, a dessert wine that is composed of a blend of Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc grapes. German sweet wines are labeled Kabinett and Spatlese.

I hope that you are now more aware of the degrees of sweetness in wines and will be able to zero in on your own preferences.  Since I prefer dry wines, I don't bother looking at the  'semi-sweet' or 'sweet' sections of restaurant wine menus.   I save a lot of time and money and now, I hope you will too.  Cheers!

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