What does it mean when we say that the wine is dry?

Question

What does it mean when we say that the wine is dry?

Answer 1

Where wine is concerned, dry is the opposite of sweet. A completely dry wine would have no residual sugar, a very sweet wine would have a lot of residual sugar.

Dry is not sweet.

Answer 2

That term 'dry' is misused so often that it’s no wonder everyone is confused. There’s a common perception that if you ask for a dry wine, you’re asking for a “good” one. Maybe it goes back to the days when a proliferation of truly-horrible sweet wine was sold, following repeal of prohibition.

Dry is the opposite of sweet. It has nothing to do with the quality or character of the wine. It’s meant to communicate the absence of sweetness.

Most of us can’t taste sugar in wine if it’s less than about .4%, so that’s the working benchmark. Wine is capable of fermenting much dryer than that, but it would be hard for most of us to tell the difference.

Here’s the way it works: Say the grapes are harvested at about 24% sugar. Fermentation is a natural chemical reaction in which yeast consumes the sugar, converting it to heat, carbon dioxide gas and alcohol (figure on a bout a 50-60% conversion rate of sugar to alcohol). To make a bone-dry wine, the winemaker lets the yeast use up all of the fermentable sugar, and comes out with a wine that’s about 13% alcohol. Generally speaking (the EU regulates this, the US doesn’t), if it’s .4% or less, we call it dry.

Hope it help

Answer 3

It is not sweet

Dennis G