My kind of dry January

In which a poor joke leads to a techy discussion about sugar levels in wine.

I recently made a bad joke in a Whatsapp group. It went something like this:

Group member: How’s dry January going for everyone?

Me: It’s going great! I haven’t drunk anything over 2 g/l all month.

Not many people laughed

Which is not surprising, because it’s quite a nerdy joke. You see, “g/l” stands for “grams per litre” and it’s a measure that’s used to indicate the amount of residual sugar in wine.

Get it?

No?

OK, then let’s go back to basics.

As grapes ripen on the vine they produce sugars. The longer they are left to ripen, the more sugars they produce. When a winemaker has decided they have produced the right amount of sugar, the grapes are harvested, crushed, and the juice is squeezed out and pumped into fermentation vessels.

---

---

Then, over the next few days/weeks, yeasts get to work eating up those sugars and converting them into alcohol – i.e. the wine ferments. When the right amount of alcohol has been produced, the winemaker will stop the fermentation (if it hasn’t stopped naturally), and then do things like filtering, barrel ageing and fining, before the wine is bottled and sent out to the shops.

So, during fermentation, a lot of the sugar in the grape juice gets turned into alcohol – but not all of it. And the sugar that’s left over after fermentation is called “residual sugar” (or RS for short).

RS is measured in grams per litre (g/l) on a scale of zero to 45 and over. And it’s this measure that we use to describe how dry or sweet a wine is. Wines with lower levels of RS are described as dry, whilst wines with higher levels of RS are described as sweet.

As always, the EU has come up with an official system for classifying these levels in wine, and it goes something like this:

• Over 45 g/l = Sweet

• Between 12 - 45 g/l = Medium sweet

• From 4 - 12 g/l = Medium dry

• And below 4 g/l = Dry

But a quick Google search will reveal various people giving various levels, so don’t get too hung up about the exact numbers – the point is, residual sugar level is what determines whether a wine is dry or sweet.

So back to my failed attempt at humour…

Group member: How’s dry January going for everyone?

Me: It’s going great! I haven’t drunk anything over 2 g/l all month. (ie: I’ve been drinking dry wine all January. Hahaha!!)

They say that humour loses its edge if you have to explain it.

They’re not wrong.

But all this tech talk does raise an interesting point. Because a lot of people talk about dry wine without really knowing what’s going on inside the glass. And that can sometimes be a bit misleading. Because people will often think that a wine is sweet when its RS level is well under 12 g/l. And that’s usually because they are confusing sweetness with fruitiness.

Fruit flavours in wine come from compounds released during fermentation (specifically esters). As wine ferments, it will develop flavours like strawberry, plum, cherry, lemon, apple, pear, melon, banana and so on (depending on whether it’s white or red and what grapes are involved). And those flavours will stay on after fermentation stops, regardless of how much sugar is left over. So, you could have a very dry wine that still has flavours of strawberry, plum, or melon.

And this is where the problem comes in. Because our brains associate these flavours with sweetness. So, when we taste them, we are left with the impression that the wine is sweet – even if it has hardly any sugar floating around.

To give a concrete example, the bodega Viñedos Verticales down in Málaga make some delicious white wines – particularly La Raspa made from the Moscatel and Doradilla grapes. Málaga is down in the hot south of Spain and Moscatel is a notoriously floral grape. So, you would expect the resulting wine to be sweet and flowery. You’re probably already imagining honeysuckle. And yes, it does have plenty of fruit flavours and delicious floral characteristics. But it’s a fresh, drinkable wine with an RS level of less than 2 g/l. Despite the fruit and the flowers, it’s a dry white wine.

The same is true at the other end of the spectrum. You can have wines with a lot of residual sugar that are quite acidic to the taste. That high level of acidity will offset or even mask a lot of the sweetness. So, wines like German Riesling, for example, can have pretty high levels of RS and still taste dry (or at least medium dry).

It sounds complicated, but in essence it’s all about understanding what’s going on in the glass so you can get better at picking a wine you like. If you speak to a wine waiter or a wine shop owner about dry wines, they’ll point you in the direction of low RS wines. That’s great if that’s what you want. But if you really mean you want something citric or acidic, or want to avoid anything too fruity or floral, then it’s better to use those terms so they can guide you to the style of wine you’re really looking for.

And if you only take away one piece of advice from this week’s column, it’s this:

Know your audience before you start telling nerdy jokes.

Cheers!