Sweetness in Wine

Sweetness in wine is one of those things everyone thinks they understand - until they actually start paying attention. Sweetness in wine is a trickster. It sidles up to you gently, smiling, and by the time you notice what it’s doing, it has already rewritten the story in your mouth. Most people say, “I like dry wine”. They think of sweetness the way they think of sugar in their coffee: simple, obvious, binary. Sweet or not sweet. Others chase syrupy bottles and call them “bold.” But the truth is, sweetness in wine is more complicated than just how sugary it tastes. It isn’t a switch. It’s a spectrum, a performance, and sometimes a lie.

Let's leave aside everything that concerns adding sugar to wine. Real sweetness comes from residual sugar - the natural grape sugar left behind when fermentation stops. Yeast eats sugar and turns it into alcohol. In a bone-dry wine, the yeast feasts like a horde of victorious Vikings and leaves nothing behind. If the yeast runs out of energy or the winemaker decides to stop fermentation early, some sugar stays in the wine. That’s what gives it sweetness. So in sweeter wines, the grapes are so sugar-loaded that even the hungriest yeast can’t finish the banquet. What’s left in the glass is sugar, yes, but also balance, weight, and shape. Simple, yes, but the perception of sweetness is a trickier beast. 

The tongue is easily fooled. Acidity, tannins, and alcohol all mess with your senses. High acidity can make a wine taste drier than it really is, it can sharpen and clean sweetness until it feels invisible - like in a good German Riesling, which can be sweeter than you think but dances so lightly it might as well be dry. Low acidity makes even a technically dry wine feel softer, almost sweet. Alcohol adds warmth, texture and volume, making a wine feel fuller, richer, even when it’s technically not sweet at all, so your brain sometimes confuses that roundness with sugar. Even oak tries to fool you - it can smuggle in vanilla and spice that trick the brain into sensing sweetness. A toasty vanilla note makes your tongue think of sweetness even when there’s none. Fruit flavors - especially ripe ones - can do the same. So a wine may not be sweet, but it can taste sweet, which is a different animal entirely. 

Labels? They tell you less than your own mouth will. Formally, there are different categories: dry wines usually have less than 9 grams of sugar per liter, semi-dry goes up to 18, semi-sweet up to 45, and sweet wines can shoot past 100. But numbers only tell part of the story. The rest is balance.

The real trick for anyone who wants to understand wine is to separate sugar from sweetness. One is chemical, the other is perception. Everything depends on what else is happening in the glass: acid, alcohol, texture, fruit, temperature. It’s a conversation, not a label.

So sweetness in wine isn’t something you simply measure; it’s something you feel. A German Spätlese Riesling and a Chablis Chardonnay might have the same residual sugar level, but the Riesling’s acidity hums beneath it like a clean note of tension and cuts through like a blade, making it seem dry, while the Chardonnay’s smoothness lingers with a honeyed feel.

A well-made sweet wine doesn’t feel cloying; it feels alive. Some dessert wines can glide rather than stick and can seem soft without being sugary. Others can tiptoe right on the line between crisp and candied. Good sweetness, like good humor, lands with timing, grace, and balance.  

And there are the clumsy ones - wines that bludgeon you with syrup and leave your teeth begging for mercy. Bad sweetness is laziness in liquid form. It’s the winemaker’s weak excuses for unripe grapes or sloppy fermentation. Supermarket reds labeled “smooth and rich” usually belong here - they drown the wine’s structure in sugar and call it charm.

So the next time, before you taste a wine, don’t rush to call it sweet or dry. Let it talk first. Sweetness has many disguises - and none of them are boring. When someone declares “I don’t like sweet wines,” what they usually mean is “I don’t like bad sweet wines.” And if you ever hear someone say, “I only drink dry wines,” just smile. They probably don’t.