Blog Brandon's Cellar Blog Hey, Sugar . . . | Hey, Sugar . . . |
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Hello again, Newt Fans! I recently received a post regarding Residual Sugar in wine, and thought it might be nice to have a brief discussion on the subject. Sounds pretty sweet, huh?
So that's where residual sugar comes from, but why is it there? Doesn't every respectable wine snob know that sweet wines belong in boxes? Not so, I say! Many of the world's wine regions specialize in outstanding sweet wines. French Sauternes, German Trockenbeerenauslese, Canadian Icewine, Hungarian Tokaji, and American Late Harvest wines all rely on high levels of residual sugar as a foundation for their distinctive character. By the way, the 1811 Chateau d'Yquem, a sweet Sauternes, is considered by some to be the best wine ever made. Unfortunately, my private cellar stock has been depleted, but if you've got a bottle, let me know. The point is, high levels of residual sugar are in some cases intentional and desirable. What about low levels? Sugar can be used to balance acidity and bitterness. A balanced wine is every winemaker's Holy Grail, you see, and regardless of whether or not we ever find it, the search is steadfast. That being said, if high acidity is brought into balance with sugar, the sweetness itself can remain undetectable to the palate. The palate is fooled, in a way, but it also works conversely. Ethanol has a sweet taste to it, and there are wines out there with obnoxiously high alcohol levels that appear to be sweeter than they really are. Just because a wine tastes dry doesn't mean it necessarily is, and just because a wine tastes a little sweet doesn't mean it is either. How's that for craziness? Craziness, indeed, brings us to the post I received asking why folks outside the Finger Lakes make no mention of residual sugar. Are we crazy, or are they? I think the reason has to do with our unique history. The wines of the Finger Lakes started primarily from hybrid grapes, which lend themselves nicely to a sweeter style. We now, however, produce sweet, dry, and middle of the road wines, which perhaps forces us to make distinctions on labels. As is turns out, though, we aren't the only ones. On Champagne bottles the words doux, sec, demi-sec and brut all refer to degrees of sweetness, as do the German words trocken, halbtrocken, lieblich, and suss. Although they aren't specific numbers, these terms apply to legal ranges of residual sugar. Here in the US, we don't have legislation defining the exact nomenclature, so if a winery wishes not to disclose the residual sugar content, it doesn't have to. So why do some? Well, if you're staring at hundreds of wines at the store, and you want something sweet (or not sweet for that matter), it might help to have some label information. If you are diabetic, or someone like me who can't afford a lot of carbs, you might also be interested in sugar content. At this time, wine does not require nutritional information like food, so residual sugar information will give you an indication of what you're drinking. So about those numbers - what do they mean? Most labels use the conventional metric units, 40 g/L, for example. A standard wine bottle is 750 mL, so that bottle would contain 30 g of sugar. Assume four glasses of wine per bottle, and that gives you 7.5 g of sugar per glass. Easy enough, right? Some labels refer to residual sugar as a percentage, say 5%. That's a weight to volume ratio, which is confusing, because the alcohol percentage is a volume to volume ratio. If the wine is 14% alcohol by volume, that means 14% of the liquid (105 mL) is alcohol. A weight ratio for sugar is more difficult, because we are used to reading sugar as a weight in grams on our food labels. That 5% by weight in our example means that you need to know the weight of the wine in the bottle - or worse - the density of the wine! Let's simplify. If you assume wine is mostly water, which has a density of 1000 g/L, to yield 5%, you would need 50 g/L of sugar, or 37.5 g per bottle, or 9.4 g per glass. Sorry, I should have warned there would be math. If you're still reading, you must be pretty serious about residual sugar. Kudos! But now some words of caution. Personally, I hold residual sugar numbers in contempt. The enologist in me knows that the accuracy of these numbers is suspect at best. What? A wine label would never lie to me! Honestly, I doubt the number is any more accurate than the promise of seductive tannins accented by a bombshell body with a long, sexy finish. Sugar is really a lump term for many sugars: glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, mannose, galactose, pentose - the list goes on and on. Not all of these sugars are measurable, especially by small wineries, and are therefore not included in the total. Higher order polysaccharides like pentose, are unfermentable, and pass straight through to the wine rendering it virtually impossible to achieve absolute dryness. If I am diabetic, should I care about pentose? Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the amount of residual sugar present does not definitively correlate to the sweetness of the wine. Remember the wine balance and palate foolery I mentioned earlier? Consider also the relative sweetness of the different sugars. The majority of the sugar in grapes is glucose and fructose, which are both reducing sugars, and therefore, fermentable. Grapes allegedly are the only fruit to contain a majority of glucose . . . Nature's Candy, you know. Anyway, a wine whose fermentation is arrested before dryness will contain virtually all fructose, because the yeast preferentially ferment glucose first. Second, a wine fermented to dryness then blended with a Sweet Reserve will contain both glucose and fructose. Finally, a wine sweetened with table sugar, sucrose, will contain all three. Sucrose is a disaccharide, which at wine pH is usually partially broken down into glucose and fructose. Who cares? Here's the problem. If all three wines have the same amount of residual sugar, all three wines will absolutely have a different sweetness. Fructose is nearly twice as sweet as sucrose, which in turn is sweeter than glucose. An equal measure of sugar does not mean an equal measure of sweetness. That's why, really, I think the Europeans have got a better system. Words like dry, off-dry, semi-dry, and sweet do the trick without attempting false specificity. I like a simple approach. Those are my thoughts on residual sugar. If you've made it all the way to the end, you deserve a prize! Perhaps something sweet? Thanks for the post, and keep 'em coming! The Cellar Couldn't Be Swell-er,
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So what is residual sugar, anyway? Well, simply stated, it's the amount of sugar left in your bottle of wine. It can come from a couple of different sources, so let's look at each one separately. First of all, the winemaker can choose to stop fermentation before all the sugar has been consumed by the yeast.
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