Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [12]
Dry wine: completely without sweetness (but not without fruitiness—we’ll explore this below)
Dry beer: slightly higher alcohol and “smoother,” according to beer marketers
Dry Champagne (“sec” in French): slightly sweet Champagne
You can see why the word dry frustrates me. I thought about banishing the “d” word, but I recognize that it is deeply entrenched in the vocabulary of the wine world. Everyone, from amateur to professional, tosses the word around. So the only solution is to define it.
“DRY” VS. “SWEET” “Dry” in wine terms means without residual (leftover) sugar. Winemakers refer to sugar in wine (which makes it taste sweet) as “residual sugar” because, in the winemaking process, fermentation usually turns all the sugar in ripe grapes into alcohol. Thus most of the big-selling wine styles are, technically, dry. Wines with residual sugar are usually made that way deliberately, to achieve a specific style. Some popular sweet wines include:
Slightly sweet style (off-dry): white Zinfandel or German Riesling Kabinett
Medium-sweet style: Italian Moscato d’Asti or German Spätlese and Auslese
Very sweet style: dessert wines like Port or Sauternes
Unless you are looking in the dessert wine section of a wine list or wine shop, most of the wines that you see for sale in stores and restaurants are dry. That includes the popular varietal (named for the grape) wines that we have been tasting and talking about, as well as the best-selling European wines with regional names such as French Bordeaux and Burgundy, Italian Chianti, and so on.
Lack of residual sugar is the winemaker’s definition of dry, but it also applies to the taster. From the taster’s point of view, dry is simply the opposite of sweet. For your tongue to taste sweetness in a wine, sugar must be present. In a dry wine, there is no perceptible sugar, and thus no sweetness. The easiest way to see this is by comparing the first two wines we’ll be trying in the tasting at the end of the chapter—a dry wine and its opposite, a sweet wine.
How sweet the wine is depends on two things:
1. How ripe the grapes are at harvest. Normally ripe grapes usually make a dry wine, because all the sugar in the grapes converts to alcohol during fermentation.
Overripe grapes have been left on the vine longer than normal before harvesting (you may see “late harvest” on the label) to gain more sugar. These extra-sugary grapes can make a slightly sweet to very sweet wine, since not all the sugar converts to alcohol during fermentation. Some of it gets left over in the wine as residual sugar, which tastes sweet.
Raisined (dried) grapes make the sweetest wines of all, because nearly all the water in the grapes evaporates, leaving almost pure sugar (think how much sweeter a raisin tastes versus a table grape). Sometimes this is accomplished by laying the grapes out on mats or hanging them up to dry, and sometimes by leaving them on the vine and letting nature take its course. In some parts of Germany, Hungary Austria, and in France’s Sauternes region a mold called botrytis (bo-TRY-tiss) attacks the grapes and shrivels them rapidly into raisins (it happens in other regions, too, but these are the most famous). The grapes don’t look pretty, but the resulting wine is as decadent as nectar.
The French name for botrytis is pourriture noble, which means “noble rot.” Anyone who has tasted a great Sauternes, or one of the great mold-flecked cheeses like Roquefort, would have to agree with the name. As the famous wine expert Hugh Johnson has said, leave it to the French to find nobility in mold! (They got it right.)
FEELING FRUITY
In the last half-dozen years or so, a new word has crept into the self-doubt-ridden wine buyers’ lexicon: fruity. And as I have discovered working in restaurants, fruity means different