The mystery of the not-so-dry dry reds

David Matthews is convinced that South African dry red wines are getting sweeter – although their sugar levels remain the same. And he has a possible answer to the paradox.

Anyone with a wine memory going back twenty years or longer cannot fail to have observed that many South African dry red wines are becoming increasingly sweet. To an adherent of red wine which is truly dry on the palate, this is both a problem and something of a mystery: for how can a wine which shows a residual sugar level of less than 2.5 grams per litre (g/l), and is therefore technically classified as extra-dry, taste sweet or sweetish? Where does the sweetness come from if it cannot be from residual sugar?

Conventional wisdom has it that, while alcohol has a sweetish taste, it is not nearly sweet enough to have a significant effect on a wine’s sweetness, nor is glycerol, which is also known to be sweet. If this is so, the question remains unanswered.

To try to better comprehend sweetness in what are technically dry red wines, we should first look briefly at the sensations of taste as a whole. As humans, we perceive four tastes on our tongues: sweet, sour (acidity), salt and bitter. We find all of them unpleasant except for sweetness. Dry red wine contains all of these tastes, in relative proportions that have come over the course of time to define and distinguish it from other alcoholic drinks, including other types of wine.

Although we do not like the taste of bitterness, it is the most interesting and complex of the four tastes to our palates. In red wine, as we know, tannin is the principal source of bitterness and ‘dryness’, and we can understand dry red wine as the deliberate extension of tannin (and its intrinsic element of bitterness) in the wine through to the optimal limit that the counterbalancing components of acidity and sweetness will agreeably permit. The wine should not taste excessively bitter, but the bitterness of the counterbalanced tannin should suffuse it.

It is the taste of tannin, with its complex bitterness and astringency, that most characterises dry red wine and distinguishes it from white wine. It is its heart and essence. It is also an acquired taste and appeals only to the adult palate. The other basic taste components – sweetness and acidity, that is – play a major role in white wine, but in dry red wine they play a more secondary, supportive part, allowing us access to the complex and subtle virtues of tannin through their ability to mask and mitigate its excesses. When this is achieved, with no component dominating the others, the wine is in balance. Should the sweetness exceed the proportion it has historically come to have, it will smother rather than balance the tannin, and the essence of dry red wine is lost.

As the only taste that we humans naturally like, sweetness has a beguiling and enduring attraction. If one may so categorise tastes, it is an infantile preference in that infants will tolerate no other taste, while a liking for other tastes develops only with experience and time. The attraction of sweetness, however, stays with us for life and we are all susceptible to it in varying degrees. It is this attraction, I believe, that has led to the increasing sweetness in dry red wines, and the concomitant subordination of tannin. I shall look at this contention further, but first we must return to the question of what causes this encroaching sweetness if not the residual sugar.

Alcohol and glycerol

In their search for the ‘essence’ of the grape, many winemakers have chosen in relatively recent times to leave the grapes on the vine until maximum ripeness is attained. This practice has had numerous inevitable oenological consequences. Maximum ripeness means maximum grape sugars that, in turn, mean high alcohol (as long as the sugar is fermented to the limit). It also means high glycerol, the third most abundant component in wine after water and alcohol. This by-product of alcoholic fermentation is almost as sweet as glucose. As noted already, however, the prevailing view is that alcohol and glycerol do not play nearly as important a role in determining sweetness on the palate as residual sugar does.

But something has to be causing the sweetness apparent on many dry wines. Doubting the conventional wisdom, and attempting to establish what this something was, I had four wines alnalysed for alcohol and glycerol. All of them had been previously analysed as having very low sugar levels (1.6, 1.5, 1.5 and 1.8 g/l respectively) and were thus classified as extra dry, but two of them nevertheless had a distinct sweetness on the palate.

The results were interesting. The two wines that tasted dry had an average alcohol level of 12.5% and an average glycerol level of 9 g/l. The two that tasted sweet had an average alcohol level of 14.9% and an average glycerol level of 12.75 g/l. Paradoxically they had the lowest sugar levels of the four. Looking for factors causing palate sweetness, the correlations lay totally in the alcohol and glycerol levels and against the residual sugar.

I appreciate that this one small test proves nothing, but it does challenge the standard view that sweetness in wine derives almost entirely from residual sugar. If high alcohol and glycerol levels do not add to sweetness significantly through their own inherent sweetness, they may do so by somehow greatly magnifying the effect of a small amount of residual sugar. However, the sheer mass of alcohol and gycerol relative to sugar in a dry red wine (113 g/l and 2 g/l respectively on a rough average for a warm-country wine) suggests that probably the alcohol and glycerol are adding significant sweetness in their own right.

The drive for sweetness

The tendency towards more sweetness in South African dry reds should be looked at in conjunction with another factor: the drive for ‘up-front’ fruit. While winemakers have (generally) not consciously attempted to make their wines sweeter, many have deliberately increased the obvious fruit in their wine. In the vineyard, leaving the grapes to achieve maximum ripeness is one way this happens; in the cellar they use techniques such as cold-soaking the grapes prior to fermentation, bleeding off some of the juice, and adding enzymes to promote extraction. The result is highly concentrated and fruity wine. At the same time, however, greater grape ripeness means more sugar to be converted into higher alcohol, and higher glycerol levels.

Winemakers are ostensibly aiming at optimum fruit, and tannin ripeness, but in doing so they are at the same time making wines which are often significantly sweeter than had earlier been the case with wines that were technically dry and had also tasted dry. They must have known this, if they had had any experience of older Cape dry reds or of their classic European equivalents. By referring only to technical definitions of dryness in terms of sugar, however, they could reassure themselves and the public that they were still making dry red wine – while the palate, the ultimate arbiter, told a different story.

I am not suggesting that this has been a conscious process. Rather, endorsed by increased demand for their produce and praise from winewriters and critics, many winemakers have chosen to go for riper, fruitier wines in the belief that it is better wine and what the market wants. However, the real force driving the demand for wines made in this new style is, I suspect, not so much the intense fruit but, in fact, the sweetness that invariably accompanies it.

This must be a controversial contention, requiring evidence to back it up. Here I can only offer some considerations as to how this has come about. Until approximately the early 1970s dry red wine worldwide was essentially defined by the nature of classic French wines. Coming from cool climates, these had relatively low levels of residual sugar, alcohol and glycerol and were fairly tannic. They were dry on the palate.

The post-war surge in economic growth in the West saw new generations of winedrinkers and, at the same time, a growth in the quantity of wine available from warm-climate areas – in recent times notably from Australia and California. While wine consumption was falling in the traditional wine-producing countries of Europe, it was increasing rapidly in Anglo-Saxon ones. These were traditionally consumers of beer, spirits and cooldrink, with little experience of wine at the mass-market level, and historically a higher level of per capita sugar consumption compared to the French.

Marketers and winemakers, especially in the New World, quickly adapted to the new circumstances and new palates. Tannin, the essence of red wine, became relegated to the background as the quest for fruit came to dominate warm-climate winemaking. Primary fruit and sweetness appealed directly to the new generation’s ‘adolescent’ palates, and the dumbing down of dry red wine proceeded apace. Winemakers in the New World (and even in Europe) who wished to make red wine in the old classic style came under increasing pressure to conform. In effect, the preference for sweetness characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon palate had displaced the European preference for tannins, as English-speakers became winedrinkers (and winemakers) in growing numbers.

 However this brief explanation accords with reality, a fundamental question requires answering: what is it in a technically dry red Cape wine that can make it taste sweetish on the palate? (I would appreciate hearing from anyone with a convincing alternative explanation.)

The phenomenon of sweetish dry reds makes South Africa’s technical designations of ‘dry’ and ‘extra-dry’ largely meaningless, in fact, inasmuch as they frequently fail to indicate what they are understood to be indicating: namely, the relative taste sensation of dryness on the palate as opposed to sweetness?

I wonder if, living in a country where sweet palates are dominant amongst winedrinkers, we have not gradually lost the desire and taste for tannin and dryness in our red wine that prevailed here when French wine was the unchallenged benchmark and winedrinking very much a minority activity. Are we reverting to type, and to a preference for sweetness, while kidding ourselves that we are still making and drinking dry red wine?

Residual / reducing sugar

Residual sugar is all the sugars (of various types) which remain in a wine after fermentation. The laboratory tests to measure this relate to most but not quite all of the sugars, and proceed by a process of reduction. So that in fact the figures normally quoted actually refer to the level of ‘reducing sugars’ remaining (the others being negligible).

Regulations in South Africa use 5 grams per litre as the maximum amount of residual (reducing) sugar allowed in a wine that may be termed dry, and 2.5 g/l as the limit for an extra-dry wine. These are for both red and white still wine. It was only during 2003 that the dry limit was raised from 4 to 5 g/l.

*David Matthews is a Cape Town businessman, winedrinker and, for thirty years, amateur winemaker.