Transcript: WINE SWEETNESS LEVELS: DRY vs OFF-DRY vs SWEET

- Oh, hey.

- I'm Aaron Pre-diabetes Inman.

- And I'm Jessie Inman.

- Today we're going to talk about sweet wine.

- Some people love them, some people hate them. Some people love to hate them. Some people hate to love them. And some people, they don't know what they are.

- Sweet wines are interesting. We don't make a sweet wine at Lucky Rock.

- We make sweet wine,

- Sweet wine

- But there's a comma

- As you'll see, there's a distinction, but a lot of people it's very polarizing in wine. It's probably sweetness. sweetness perceived, sweetness is probably one of the most poorly understood part of the wine business. A lot of people will say, "Oh, there's no way I drink a sweet wine," but then they enjoy a Coca-Cola that's got 44 grams per can. So it's kind of interesting. And we'll dive into that a little bit. And here's your second favorite part of the show we ask you to like, and subscribe. Why don't you smash that fast red button down there at the bottom for us, please.

- Please. So brother, Aaron, what are we gonna be talking about today?

- So today we're going to talk about sugar and wine. So sugar's in all wines, but you can't taste sugar in all wines. And we're going to tell you how it's involved in wine-making process, a little bit more about how it's involved in the perception of wines and some it's different wines, different styles that involve different levels of sugar, residual sugar.

- Okay. So, from a wine-making standpoint, there's sugar in grapes. Sugar is glucose and fructose. Yeast eat sugar and creates heat, CO2, and alcohol.

- Seems easy enough

- Easy enough. Sometimes you have a stuck fermentation. But that means the yeast basically produced too much alcohol that'll kill themselves. Sometimes winemakers will use it as a tool and leave sugar in there. They'll arrest fermentation; Stop it by adding maybe something like sulfur, kills off the yeast or inhibits the yeast from fermenting anymore. And then there'll be a certain amount of sugar left in the wine to maybe balance out the of the wine. Or maybe the acid's is really high, like in say, a German reasoning or something.

- Or maybe yes, stylistically.

- Stylistically, they'll leave 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 grams per liter.

- 900. So simple, but complex like many things in wine. And the other thing is, is very polarizing. People love to talk about sugar and wine, especially like the pundits in wine about like how, you know, there's a lot of like, "oh, sugar is bad; that sugar is terrible." And then it's like, when they talk about that, they're talking more about like deceptively sweet wines, which we'll talk about maybe in a future episode, where people aren't being as truthful about what kind of profile their wines have.

- Yeah. Like I would say a lot of people don't realize how much sugar is in their Coca-Cola, unless they look at the back. Because it doesn't taste like it did, but it's balancing something out.

- Yeah. And so that leads us to one of those questions a lot of people ask is, can you add sugar to wine? And you can, but it gets complicated. So like in Oregon, for example. Well, prior to global warming, Oregon was a little bit cooler than California. Maybe a little bit.

- And Sutherland's way cooler. Yeah, yeah. To some, that was a dreadlock. And so, single dreadlock.

- Yeah.

- Like they do Portland. So when you talk about adding sugar to wine, a lot of what I'm talking about with Oregon is sometimes they weren't able to get that fully right.

- Right.

- And so they have higher acids, but they don't have as much sugar, which is like, we were talking about earlier, not going to give you as much alcohol, which is going to reduce the body of the wine and some of the flavor profiles and things of that nature. So you could actually add: Sugar.

- Pure sugar. In California, you can't, but in Oregon, you can.

- Correct. And so you could add that to get the alcohol level up to where you wanted it to be. Now in California, like Jesse was saying, you actually, it's illegal to add sugar to a wine.

- I got put in jail once for it. Just kidding.

- It doesn't mean that you can't sweeten the wine.

- Right. Because you can add grape "concentrate"

- Yeah. You're adding "sugar" but not CNH sugar. You're adding sugar from a natural-

- A grape sauce

- Yeah, on natural grapes sauce.

- And so that's still a little bit confusing to people. It's a distinction for sure. But at the end of the day, you can sweeten California wines. And that's where a lot of the people we're talking about with like the polarization of wine is people adding back concentrate in California.

- To that point, you can add sugar before fermentation to get the alcohol up, to add more fuel for the yeast basically. Or you can add it after fermentation to increase the sweetness, and then it won't ferment anymore. And to Jesse's point earlier, you can do that for different reasons. People have a proclivity towards sweetness.

- Proclivity; good word.

- I looked that up earlier. So there's that. But then there's also balancing out the acids and the tannins and things in that, and going from maybe a little more body and wine. So there's a lot of stylistic reasons people do that. And I really think sugar sugar's really gotten to be Orphan Annie here.

- Like-

- I proclivity sugar myself. I used that wrong.

- People are really like anti-sugar and you know, I get it to a certain extent. There's an issue with too much sugar in the American diet.

- Maybe we should start adding Stevia to our diet.

- Well, you know, what's kind of like Stevia? Oak. You can think of Oak Oak is kind of the artificial sweetener of wine in a lot of ways.

- Lot of flavors come from wood.

- Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, that's, one of the things is sugar kind of gets a little bit of bad rap. And I think if you overuse it, of course, but a lot of times it's just a tool and there's no reason to like, you know, hate a wine because it's got a little RS, if it balances out that wine.

- RS has residual sugar.

- Bingo. All right. And so when you're making wines that are intentionally sweet, there's a, there's a spectrum. Right? And so most wines that we're drinking in the states are considered more on the bone-dry side. So if you've got the scale here, you've got bone dry here, which is less than one gram per liter of residual sugar, to you've got very sweet over here, which I think is 150 grams per liter plus, which seems crazy sweet. But then you're also back to what we were talking about earlier, balancing out some of the acidity and different extractables and things of that nature. So it's about making a style and a balance.

- Yeah. And so just from a more of a simple standpoint, you kind of, you know it, when you, when you taste it, you tasted a bone-dry wine. You're like, "Ooh, that's got no sugar." It's like very high acid or lots of tannin that's considered of dry. It might be off dry. It's just being hidden by something. And then there's like a semi-sweet or off dry wine that you're like, "Well, I think there's a little sugar in there." That's a, that's an off dry wine. And if you're like, "Whoa, this is sweet. That's a sweet wine. Pretty simple scale.

- You know, like to get into that, we're going to taste three different wines today. One of them is bone dry. It's the Lucky Rock Sauvignon Blanc. There's no residual sugar in that. We've fermented it, we had a healthy fermentation, all the sugars- Yeah. If I remember correctly, it's like 0.32 grams per liter, which is basically basically nothing.

- Basically nothing. And I believe there's, you know, just like anything else, some people can dunk a basketball; some people can't. Some people can have different thresholds of taste. And so some people, I believe the perceivable sweetness is around two grams for most people.

- Okay. So for the first one, you know, you got to drink your own Kool-Aid, we make this one, we know it's dry.

- [Aaron] I heard it got 90 points recently,

- Dreadlocks to us.

- There's my dreadlock.

- Cheers to us. So this is an intentionally dry wine. It's higher on the acid side. And so you could potentially leave a little sugar in there, but it's going to make it fat or you want a little bit more racy, a little bit more clean. And that's, that's why we fermented dry and don't leave any sugar in it.

- And any sweetness that's perceived from this is really gonna come from alcohol. Maybe there's a little bit of Oak on this, so you're gonna get some of those kinds of artificial sweetener from Oak. And that's really about it.

- And also high acid wines, maybe not Sauvignon Blanc per se, but things with high acid go through high fats, 'cause they kind of clean right through it.

- Sure.

- Next up we have Dr. Loosen And it's the Smurgundy,

- Ah, the Guggenheimer.

- And it's a Spiitlese. Which is a little bit higher on the sweet scale than most people picking it off the shelf would probably guess. But we'll see how it holds up in the wine.

- Yeah. You're talking about around 62 grams per liter, residual sugar--

- Diabetes territory, for sure.

- It's definitely sweeter than what I normally drink. I tend to drink mainly dry wines.

- And this has a little bit of CO2 in it also, which will help kind of lift all the flavors up, but also helps cut through the sugar. So the sugar is cutting through the acid and the CO2 is kind of cutting through the sugar.

- To me, I would love this kind of wine. I tend to eat a lot of like spicy food, especially like South East Asian. I love like Vietnamese food, is probably one of my go-to's. And this kind of wine, and it's kind of cliche to say, but like, a little bit of RS really helps curb the heat, like of the chili peppers and things of that.

- So thirdly, we have the La Fleur Renaissance, which is the Renaissance flower, if I remember correctly. And French.

- And when I was into poetry in high school, that was my stage name.

- And this one has roughly 1 million grams of sugar per liter.

- This one is quite sweet, as they say in the biz.

- So Sauternes are usually Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc, but they're usually infected or allowed it to be infected with vitritis. And vitritis is, they call it 'Noble rot.' It pulls moisture out, but at leaves acid and sugar in. So you get really high acid, really high sugar, which is usually kind of inverted.

- And as you ripen too, we were talking about glucose and fructose earlier, being the primary. As you get an overripe grape, you tend to have higher concentration of fructose than you do glucose. And fructose is about twice as sweet as glucose. So that also adds some of the sweetness to these kind of wines.

- Yeah, they're actually really nice wines, but they started getting characteristics you wouldn't normally get in grapes because of the Noble rot.

- And it's very viscous because of that. It has a lot of weight compared to, The Sauvignon Blanc was lighter, fresher. Whereas the Dr. Loosen started to have a little more texture, a little more sweetness. And then this one has a lot of viscosity and it's, it's fairly sweet, but it has a lot of like, kind of like, apricot and honeyed kind of notes. There's a reason that they tend to come out with the dessert card at the fancy restaurant when you're there for your anniversary or your prom, or your kids can't drink, can they?

- Nah, man. No.

- But now, the card comes out with the coffee and the coffee cake and the stuff. And the Sauternes. There's a reason for that. Because a lot of times, if you're drinking these too early on, it can kind of crush your palette a little bit too, because it's sweet.

- Well, now I have diabetes.

- Whoa. But outside of my diabetes, what did we learn today?

- So aside from his Diabetes, I think we learned that these wines have a different kind of time and place within your, your day. A lot of it's going to be around meals, which a lot of times wine is a go-to for mealtime. So these are just going to be kind of different, different styles of food, maybe different courses of the food. If you course at your house, I don't, but I do eat food and then have dessert.

- Of course you do. And so that's a big thing there. One thing I was going to throw out, we didn't talk about it. You know, we don't want to go into everything, but if you're a avid champagne drinker, the sugar levels in champagne, you really want to pay attention to, because you've got all the way from, like, the brut, which is where I tend to play, which is kind of a 0-15 gram per liter brut--

- The brute extra and brute natural are almost nothing. The brut are a couple of times. And so then you've got your Sec and your Demi-sec and those kinds of things. And you do want to know those because those are going to have different levels of sweetness that if you're a champagne drinker, you're going to want to know. But go-to, If you want kind of a dry, maybe just slightly off dry-brut is always a nice one.

- And I've had chefs tell me in the restaurant business when I was working with them; champagne pairs with anything.

- Good days, bad days, rain, sun, champagne.

- We're going to go brush our teeth now because they're very sticky.

- Thanks for joining us on this wild and extravagant ride.

- You got any wine in there? We got to do a proper cheers. It's actually seven years of bad luck. Or is that a myth?

- I don't know.

- Something, you got to have wine in your glass to cheers. Don't be that person at Thanksgiving that ghost to cheersing. Cheers. See you next episode.