One of the more difficult hurdles in discovering and enjoying wine is our preference for sweet versus dry. It is, by far, one of the most asked questions and the characteristic that harbors the most resistance to unfamiliar wines. For many of us, it is either one or the other with no middle ground. The majority of wines in our shop, on the grocery shelf or on a restaurant wine list are vinified to the drier side. So, most of the wines that you see out there are dry, but there are plenty of sweet wines to be found when you know what to look for.
Skip ahead if you just want to see the sweet suggestions, but here is what makes wine sweet or dry. Like any fruit, grapes are naturally loaded with sugar. To make wine, yeast is added to the grape juice, and fermentation begins; the yeast eats the sugar. When all of the sugar is consumed, the resulting wine will have little or no sugar and is considered “dry.” Halting the fermentation process prematurely would allow the sugars to live on in a wine with higher sugar content. Thus, sweet wine. To put it another way, the grapes are laden with sugars that, by fermentation, are converted to alcohol to produce wine. Leaving more sugar in the wine produces a sweeter product. Because alcohol is the byproduct of this sugar orgy, sweet wines also tend to have a lower alcohol content. When the yeast is allowed to consume more of the sugar, more alcohol is produced.
Henry Foy is the owner of Emporium Wine, Spirits and Cigars, now celebrating over 21 years of writing about and selling wine in downtown Alexander City at 128 Calhoun Street. For current hours, events and information call 256-212-WINE (9463).
