Wine Chronicles: When “Dry” Wine Isn’t Dry
By Dan Berger
Summary: Dan Berger examines how California wineries risk deepening consumer confusion when labels describe wines as dry even when the wines taste sweet or soft. He links the practice to broader questions of truth in marketing and to research showing that hesitant wine consumers often avoid buying bottles because they cannot predict what style they will get. The column suggests that a small amount of residual sugar can make some wines more approachable, but only when balanced by low pH, acidity and transparent labeling. It closes with a wine discovery for 2022 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon from Spring Mountain District.
Readers might also enjoy Berger’s recent wine writing in Sonoma County Features and Lake County Features.
“The solution is simply that many dry white wines should actually have some residual sugar.” — Dan Berger
NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — In his new politically oriented book, “Liar’s Kingdom,” attorney Andrew Weissmann discusses people who brazenly lie in public statements, and he explains the legal implications of political lying, especially over the last decade. The book illuminates that it is illegal to lie under oath in a court of law and especially to Congress. He also makes the point that it is not against the law for a politician who is seeking office to lie consistently in public statements in an attempt to win an election. Or, for that matter, it’s fine for a politician to lie in public about almost anything else.
Politicians regularly fabricate outrageously on their resumés. Recall George Santos? Despite admitting several fabrications, his lying did not prevent him from being seated and serving in Congress. He eventually pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud and was expelled from Congress in 2023.
In his book, Weissmann delves into cases where someone seeking office lies about having earned the Medal of Honor, the U.S. Armed Forces’ highest military award. Weissmann says a special law makes it illegal for someone to falsely claim earning that award. But other lies are protected speech.
Lying directly or indirectly (by implication) is a widely used tactic in the business world. Dozens of California wineries are guilty of indirect lying when they release white wines such as chardonnay and sauvignon blanc that historically are dry — but in recent decades have grown increasingly sweeter and/or have far less acidity than traditional “dry” table wines always had in the past.
Perhaps selling a chardonnay that is actually laden with sugar or has low acidity isn’t actually lying. And there is absolutely nothing illegal about this. In fact, it is a time-honored (though odious) business practice. But such a practice certainly is disingenuous, even though it may be rampant.
There’s an old saying in the wine business: Americans talk dry but drink sweet. This has been proven to be accurate with thousands of domestic wines from chardonnay to chenin blanc, from pinot gris to the recent (detestable) trend with several expensive cabernet sauvignons.
It is obvious to me. I have evaluated wine for more than 50 years. In the last 20 years and especially quite recently, almost every commercial California wine has risen in sweetness and/or softness. As a result, fewer New World wines today are being produced to work with the foods we eat regularly. The trend today with most whites and many reds is to simply treat them as cocktails. Or serve them with foods that are slathered with hoisin, ketchup or barbecue sauce.
This is one reason why California wines do not have a significant presence in European retail shops or restaurants. Based on the kind of wines Europeans typically drink, which tend to be much drier than our wines, it is no wonder that California-style wines might be seen as too simplistic for Europeans who grew up with truly dry, lower-alcohol wines.
This trend toward sweetness in California wine gets even worse when the word “dry” begins showing up on wine labels of wines that aren’t. A few weeks ago, I purchased a domestic wine that said on its label “Dry Chenin Blanc.” Uh, nice try, but it wasn’t dry. Then it happened again with a “Dry Riesling.” Again, it was sweet — almost sweet enough to serve with dessert.
Using the word “dry” on a bottle of wine is intended to appeal to people who “talk dry but drink sweet.” I appreciate that selling California wine to Americans is critical to a winery’s health. And if a wine is too dry, many people will not like it. I get that. Unfortunately, partially as a result of the disastrous legacy of Prohibition, the United States has never developed a broad wine-drinking culture similar to what exists in Europe. So maybe most wineries have to sell sweet wine to sell it at all.
But now investigations have begun into our classification of people who are being called “wine-hesitant consumers.” Polling of this new group of wine-avoiders indicates that lying about wines to sell to them might very well be causing some of the remarkably slow sales of wines in the United States over the last three years. Some of these people are saying that they have no idea what kind of wine is in a bottle, so they’re hesitant to put their money down for something that could possibly not be in a style they like.
Christian Miller, research director for the Wine Market Council, said that 23% of respondents who were identified as wine-hesitant consumers said in a consumer survey that these folks had experienced situations where wines they had purchased, which they anticipated liking, turned out to be distasteful to them.
The Wine Market Council conducted research in conjunction with Quini Data, based in Vancouver (British Columbia), Canada, where they held blind tastings of nearly 70 wines mainly priced $10-$45. About 400 “infrequent wine drinkers” were polled.
In an article in the North Bay Business Journal reporting on the research projects, reporter Jeff Quackenbush wrote, “Sweetness … correlated positively with liking [a wine], though the data suggested that balance matters more than simple sugar levels. Fruit-forward flavors, chocolate and caramel notes generally performed well among ‘hesitant consumers’ while spicy and earthy notes trended lower.”
It seems to me that the California wine industry must take a serious look at how wine is made and marketed. When a wine is not strictly very dry, using the word “dry” on the label should be done with extreme care and perhaps avoided.
I make a small amount of dry riesling every year. It is dry. I put the wine into a Burgundy-shaped bottle. If I used a tall, slender “hock” bottle, most people would assume the wine was sweet; taller bottles typically contain sweeter wines. Using a Burgundy shape implies the wine will be dry. To make it clear that it is, I put all the wines’ statistics on the side label.
This sends a message: The wine will be austere and thus oriented toward the dinner table. My 2022 riesling has zero sugar and a very low pH (2.92). It is one of the driest wines ever made anywhere and thus has positive implications for diabetics who are concerned with ingesting sugar. There is none. Some people have said it is too dry to drink. But people who love my style of wine always say how wonderful it went with food.
Producing a dry wine is much easier today than it was prior to the mid-1940s, when sterile filtration was developed that allowed winemakers to remove all traces of yeast, preventing in-the-bottle refermentation. This allowed German riesling producers, among others, to make dry wines that actually had residual sugar and would be stable.
Many German rieslings today have the word “trocken” (dry) on their labels (or other terms that imply dryness). Yet some of these wines have traces of residual sugar but are actually dry to the taste because they have high acidity and a very low pH. And many have extremely low alcohol levels.
By using the term “dry” on wines that are not strictly dry, California wineries are simply continuing the trend that has existed for decades with California wines. Say it’s dry, even when it’s sweet. One solution to this is one I began to use with my 2023 riesling.
Winemaker Evan Damiano, who has made all three of my dry rieslings, allowed the 2022 wine to complete fermentation until it was totally bone dry. The riesling came out exactly as I had hoped but was so austere that for the first three years it was difficult to understand. Even Evan was a little concerned.
When the 2023 riesling was harvested at approximately the same sugar content, I asked Evan to stop the fermentation when there was a trace of sugar remaining. It finished at about 1.5 grams per liter of sugar (just over 1%). Even though that is technically below where most people can detect any sweetness, the 2023 is more drinkable today than my still-backward 2022.
Although I wasn’t thinking that the 2023 riesling would end up to be an object lesson, I recently consumed some of this wine and mused about whether there was something to be learned from the technique. I began talking with several winemakers, and I believe the technique applies to several different kinds of wines.
The solution is simply that many dry white wines should actually have some residual sugar.
The idea I came up with is simply that by leaving a tiny trace of residual sugar but keeping the pH of the wine very low and making certain that the alcohol level doesn’t rise above about 12.5%, almost any wine can be made that is dry enough, but the trace of sugar allows the wine’s acid and pH to harmonize.
The problem with this is easy to understand. By leaving a trace of residual sugar, most wines need to be sterile-filtered, which can reduce some of the wines’ potential. But most people do not worry about aging their white wines.
Filtration rarely is a sound technique for potentially great wine, but the tactic might work best with some inexpensive wines that are not intended to develop additional characteristics. Though I don’t love most of the sweet cabernets being made today, a few of them have been interesting. While I am relatively certain there was some residual sugar in some of those I have tasted, the best didn’t taste sweet. I sensed it as a richer texture.
A winemaker I consulted about this said that decades ago he worked for a large wine company making a large red wine blend. The wine wasn’t very engaging. A supervisor told him, “Just sweeten it,” knowing that filtration wouldn’t harm the product. “But to me and my assistant, it was almost betraying our craft. Any fool can add sugar.”
He said he worked tirelessly trying to find other techniques that would make the wine more interesting, and he found that nothing he tried worked. “So, for this one blend we used 50 ppm of sugar,” about .05 g/L, which he said worked. “You couldn’t taste it as sweetness, but it was there as a richer texture.”
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Dan Berger has been writing about wine since 1975.
Wine Discovery:
2022 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon, Spring Mountain District ($75): The phrase “mountain-grown” should, seriously, mean a lot more than it does. A few coffee suppliers use the term. It also is used by a Colorado company that sells flowers that grow at 10,600 feet and by a mushroom extract company. An internet search of the term turns up several more people claiming special properties of their goods because they come from higher altitudes. It is also true for cabernet sauvignon when other attributes (proper soils, good farming, sound winemaking tactics) are all employed. And this wine is an exemplary example of what it is all about.
What this wine is not about is simply concentration, although it has that, too. Some mountain-grown cabernet is little more than weighty, big and brawny. Anyone who knows this wonderful 45-year-old project knows it relies on an annual combination of intense aromatics that represent the grape. Oak is not obvious. The structure is ideal for trying with food now but also allows it to age with remarkable consistency, almost regardless of the vintage. The reason is altitude and a philosophy to adhere to a near-perfect house style.
This vintage might have proven to be a little dicey for some North Coast wineries because it was marked by a lot of heat, which often produces cabernets of clumsiness and insufficient acidity. This wine adheres to the winery’s classic balanced style. It has aromas of blackberry with traces of dried herbs, an amazingly fruit-driven entry and a perfect balance of flavors in the aftertaste that portend great things in a decade or three. Oak is not an issue; there is a trace of cedar, but it is completely integrated. Growing in volcanic soils at the very top of Spring Mountain, these dry-farmed vines benefit from slightly cooler temperatures than those on the Napa Valley floor because of altitude (1,800 to 2,000 feet). Smith Madrone is one of only about a dozen Napa properties that understand the historic cabernet legacy of this valley. It continues to adhere to the principles that produced worldwide accolades for California cabernets 50 years ago in Paris. At the price the winery is charging, this ought to be at the top of everyone’s mandatory-buy list. — Dan Berger Review
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Dan You missed a decimal point about your riesling.. 1.5 gr/l RS is not about1% RS, it is approx. .15% 1% RS would defintely not be dry, but off-dry == otherwise, spot on, and I agree mostly. THough, to be fair, I have a sneaking suspicion that the rise in '" sweeter dry wines"" may be a function of global warming the last quarter century, and possibly as well, a way to deal with stubborn, 'stuck'ferments: sort of make lemonade when you have lemons. Jb
Thank you for the nice article. Where can one find dry Riesling?