A Spoonful of Sugar Doesn’t Help The Wine Go Down!!

Mary Poppins wasn’t talking about wines when she sang “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”. Consumers get confused when it comes to a wine that is smooth and ripe and dry versus a wine that is well….downright sweet! Technically a wine is  DRY Wine when all the natural grape sugar eats the yeast and is converted to Alcohol. If the grapes were picked or harvested at the right degree of ripeness than you should be able to achieve that outcome. Most snobs will say that a wine is Dry when the sugar left in the wine after fermentation is under 1 gram per liter or better yet O grams per liter. I personally am alright with wines that are considered dry if they have under 2 grams per liter. Slightly off dry under 3.5 grams per liter. The problem is AMERICANS are addicted to SUGAR. We are seeing some of the post popular expensive Napa Valley especially Cabernet Sauvignons  and Pinot Noir and Cult Red Blends with over 10 GRAMS of Residual Sugar and the American Palate says to them, they are DRY WINES. To me that is Dessert Wine almost. So many wines on the marketplace that sell over 760,000 cases per year are on restaurant wine lists for $100 or more that have dessert wine levels of Sugar. The purpose of this video is to differentiate between wines that TECHNICALLY are called DRY WINES because almost every drop of grape sugar was converted into alcohol and the wine can still be smooth and silky with ripe fruit notes and silky tannins as opposed to the wines that Americans call DRY wines in taste when technically those wines purposely keep about 10 grams per liter or higher Residual Sugar in the wine. I hope each day that we can get wine drinkers , especially in America, to start noticing the difference of a Wine that is Lush and Full Bodied and Silky but still a Dry Wine and the wines that are Lush and Silky and Full Bodied but have so much sugar it is close to that of a dessert wine. It all comes down to the proper timing or decision making of when the grapes are picked. I hope this clears up the confusion a bit.

Grape-fully yours, Larry