What are dry wines?
Do you prefer dry wines? What are dry wines anyway?
When helping a customer find the perfect wine for their dinner or special occasion there are a few questions that I ask to help determine to type of wine that they will enjoy. The dry question frequently comes up. In the world of wine terminology, dry refers to the opposite of sweet. A completely dry or “bone” dry wine would have zero residual sugar left from the fermentation process.
Many people don’t realize this, but most wines can be made in either a sweet or dry style depending on the methods employed by the winemaker and if a complete fermentation occurs. There are several ways to end up with a sweet wine, but a dry wine has its sugars converted into alcohol below the threshold of human perception.
Some people mistakenly use the term dry to refer to tannin, however, this is not technically what it refers to in wine speak.
The trickiest part about the dry question is that the brain can deceive us and it frequently does.
When our olfactory nerve which registers smell tells us that there is a lush fruity aroma in our wine glass it will sometimes convince our mind that a wine is sweet when it is actually dry. So, for this reason a wine can be fruity but still dry. For this reason, I typically recommend wines that aren’t fruity even if they are dry to people seeking dry wines. There are many different levels of sweetness to the wines in the average market and unfortunately the USA does not have any system for classification of sweetness. Hopefully, we will adopt a system in the future because if you aren’t familiar with a wine on the shelf it is almost impossible to know for sure whether it is sweet or dry. There are some wines that tend to be sweet in the US market such as Riesling and Muscat, however, those also can come in dry versions. There is certainly a “sweetness creep” occurring in the global marketplace to appeal to the American consumer. That being said most serious wine drinkers don’t seem to want to admit they like sweet wines even if they drinking large quantities of sweetish Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon. European countries have very specific systems to designate sweetness levels and I hope that the USA gets on board that idea.