How to Know if a Wine Will Be Sweet
I used to work at a French wine bar where we had a dry Riesling on the menu. All the time, I would hear customers say, “This one is dry even if it’s a Riesling? Is that a typo?”
Wine drinkers want to know with confidence whether a wine will be sweet or dry before tasting it. But how can you really tell? First, you have to understand how wines become sweet.
Wine Sweetness is Determined by Three Things
1. The sugar level of the berries at harvest.
Think of the sugar level in the berries at harvest as the limiting factor for sweetness. Unless the winemaker is chaptalizing (a fancy term for adding sugar to the wine tank before or during fermentation, which is outlawed in many places) or using sugary, color-correcting additives, the amount of residual sugar in the wine will be limited by the sugar level in the grape juice.
But, still, if the yeasts convert all of this sugar into alcohol, the wine will be dry. This brings us to number 2…
