The hubs and I were celebrating 13 years of marital bliss at a cute little restaurant in Carmel, CA when the first disagreement of our 14th year of marriage unfolded.
Let me start of with a little background. I am in the middle of studying for my Italian Wine Scholar certification and have what seems like an impossible number of wines to try in order to prepare for the exam. Therefore I am always scouring restaurant wine lists to see if they have a varietal (grape) or appellation that I can check off of my list. In fact, my husband picked this particular establishment because of the numerous options available from Italy and beyond. However, he is a beer drinker and does not share my passion for wine but ironically is a better taster than I am in that he can appreciate more flavors and aromas than I can -- so frustrating really!! Naturally, I forced him to drink some of the wine so that he could help me with my analysis.
The wine I ordered was a white blend from the Costa d'Amalfi that was a mix of 3 grapes I had never tasted before: Fenile, Ginestra and Ripoli. I immediately looked it up as soon as the sommelier took our order in eager anticipation. When it arrived it was golden in color with fragrant aromatics of peach and apricot and then there was the taste, oh the taste! The flavors in the mouth were even better than the aromas, just like biting into fresh juicy fruits. That is when my husband piped in with "I am surprised you like this wine, I thought it would be too sweet for you." I tried to explain to him that despite the fruity flavors we were appreciating, the wine was in fact not sweet. I went on to explain that what he was calling sweet was just the aromas of fruit that the wine was giving off and that the wine was actually dry (which means little to no residual sugar). He was not buying it and therefore we had several exchanges that ending with me telling him that I would blog about the whole episode.
According to the Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia, the way we taste smells is explained as the brain being tricked into thinking any "taste" other than sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami is actually a complex flavor rather than just an aroma being transmitted to our brains by the olfactory bulbs either through the nose when we sniff something or retronasally when we swallow. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that I prefer to swallow my wine and not spit it at a tasting. Otherwise if I spit, I feel like I am missing an entire piece of the wine, especially with the fragrant ones. A wine lecture I recently attended explained that if you cannot tell if a wine is sweet because there is actually sugar present or if it is simply fruity, then you should take a drink and plug your nose. If the wine still seems sweet with your nose plugged, then you are tasting the sugar on the front of your tongue and there is in fact some level of sweetness in the wine but if not, then you are likely just understandably associating fruity aromas with actual sweetness that is not present.
I struggled with this concept when I was first getting into wine but then I realized that sweetness level is a defined term and not an opinion or perception. It is either present or not and to varying degrees. Wines are categorized based on sweetness levels and in the US a "dry" wine means that there up to 4 g/l, medium dry is >4-12 g/l, medium sweet is >12- 45 g/l and a "sweet" wine is >45 g/l of residual sugar. (There are a few definitions that allow up to 9 g/l for dry and up to 18 g/l for medium dry depending on total acidity / grams of tartaric acid, but that is beyond the scope of this blog and I only include it for completeness sake.) This Passito wine is a sweet wine that I also tasted on this trip and I, maybe, drank only 1.5 oz. It was quite delicious, but I developed a cavity in the middle of it so I had to stop {sarcasm}.
Now I know that this is bringing up another subject that is near and dear to me as I am currently doing very well on keto but continue to drink wine. *** Most wine is actually low carb for the most part*** There are some nuances of course and there will be a future blog dedicated entirely to carbs and wines, but a dry wine (of which a majority of the wines most people drink are) with a max residual sugar (RS) of 4 g/l sugar would only be 0.6 grams of sugar per 5 0z serving (and there are 25 oz or 750 mL/ bottle = 3 g sugar for the whole bottle) which is well within the allowable limits. Even the sweet wine with 45 g/l of sugar would only be 6.75 g/l and I would have to force myself to drink 5 oz of a wine that is sweet by definition.
Well, I know everyone is on the edge of their seats so I will let you know that I finally convinced him that the wine was in fact dry and not sweet, but I did have to act a little professorial and nerd out on him a bit. This is a picture of us the next morning on the 17 mile drive in Pebble Beach.
I hope you enjoyed learning about what makes a wine sweet and feel free (seriously) to leave comments or questions because there is a lot of information on this topic that I would love to talk about with you but would have made this post exhaustive. I will make edits or additions based on any comments that come through. Also, as always, let me know what you want to hear about.
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