Residual sugar is a hot topic in wine, but it's also often confused with the perception of sweetness. Winemaker Scott Harvey of Scott Harvey Wines breaks down the difference in today's edition of Ask The Expert!
Are Sweetness and Residual Sugar the Same in Wine?
I have been making both dry and sweet wines with residual sugar in them for 47 years. I went to winemaking/enology school in Germany and apprenticed there making an array of sweet wines from the dryer styles of Trocken, Halbtrocken Kabinett and Spätlese to the sweeter versions of Spätlese, Auslesse, Eiswein and Trokenbeerenauslese.
The simple answer is sweetness and residual sugar are not the same but have a lot to do with each other. Sweetness is a perception one gets from the wine. Residual sugar is the measurement of the amount of sugar left in the wine. All wines have some residual sugar in them whether they taste dry or sweet.
Things that create the prescription of sweetness in wine are not only residual sugar, but also alcohol, oak, low acidity/high pH and richness compounds. We make a dry Riesling under the Jana label from Mendocino. Because of California’s warm climate, Riesling grown here reaches the point of optimum varietal flavor at low brix/sugar and high acidity/low pH. Our Riesling has 1.2% residual sugar with 1.0 % acidity/3.1pH.
Most California wine makers would be scared to death to make a wine at 3.1pH. They do not have the experience with high acid/low pH wines that a German trained winemaker has. So, they let the grapes ripen to a point they are more comfortable with of higher sugar and lower acidity. By this time, all varietal character is gone.
Their Riesling will be higher in alcohol, lower in acidity/higher pH. The same wine with 1.2% residual sugar will be noticeably sweet with no varietal character while our Jana Riesling with the same residual sugar will appear bone dry and taste like Riesling.
Things that create the perception of dryness in wine are not only a low level of residual sugar, but high acidity/low pH, tannin and bitter compounds. A good example of this is the difference between “New World” and “Old World” wines.
Old World is the traditional way of making wine from ripe but not over ripe grapes to produce a wine that is balanced to have with food. A wine that tells its story of variety, place and vintage. That has enough acidity to cleans your palate so that you maintain the first bit experience throughout a meal. The dryness in such a wine is not only due to lower residual sugar, but higher acidity/lower pH and tannin.
Our Scott Harvey Old World style Zinfandel is garnet colored and Claret like in style. It is a wine that works with dinner rather than overpowering it.
Because Americans are high extractive cold beverage drinkers, winemaker friends of mine have developed the New World style to meet the American palate. Well made examples of this are 7 Deadly Zins and Klinker Brick.
Grapes are picked riper to express more prune, plum and raisin characters and a sweet concentrate of high color is added. The wine ends up being much higher in alcohol, lower in acidity/higher pH and black in color.
This is the perfect wine for drinking cold in a social gathering but completely overpowers food destroying the ability to keep having that first bite experience throughout the meal. Both wines have their place and are well made for their respective New or Old World style.
German wine law states that to label a wine dry (Trocken) the measurement of residual sugar in the wine must be within 2 points of the acidity. A wine with 9g/l or .9% acidity can have as much as 11g/l or 1.1% residual sugar and still be labeled dry. Half dry (Halbtrocken) is 14 points.
Another great example is the International Riesling Foundation’s sweetness scale. This scale was developed by Riesling producers from around the world, including me. It not only takes into account the residual sugar and acidity, but also includes pH. (Next time we can talk about the difference between pH and acidity.) You can go to their website for a complete explanation on the matrix.
Thanks again to Winemaker Scott Harvey of Scott Harvey Wines for his answer to the question: Are Sweetness and Residual Sugar the Same in Wine?
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