Wine tasting can at times be exasperating. There you are waxing lyrically about the asparagus nose and zingy acidity of what you know is a Sauvignon Blanc, only to be told that the wine is actually a Riesling. Such a nightmare moment all fellow wine tasters will recognise. So too the situation where as soon as you profess to have a passing interest in wine, a glass is thrust into your hand and the inevitable question is asked, “Well, what is it”? A tip here for such occasions is to describe what the wine is not rather than what it is. This elimination technique may seem somewhat evasive, but it has the advantage of equally wowing friends and more likely prevent the falling-flat-on-your-face moment.
Party tricks aside, wine tasting is a skill, which just like any other skill can with practice be acquired with the only prerequisite being having a sense of smell. It does help to acquire a modicum of understanding of human physiology, essentially the basics of how we smell and taste. For example, the sensation of sweetness is mostly picked up on the tip of the tongue. Next time you taste wine or pretty well any liquid for that matter, concentrate on the tip of the tongue. You should be able to pick up the fact that the liquid either appears sweet or not. How sweet or not the liquid appears will be different for different people based upon an individual’s tolerance. In other words, one person’s sweetness can be another person’s sour and vice versa.
I use the term sweetness, but what is being identified and categorised is the amount of sugar, expressed in wine tasting parlance as grams per litre. In general terms and in most countries, a wine with a residual sugar content of below 4 or 5 grams per litre is usually categorised as dry. Above 9 or 10 grams a litre then the wine is categorised as sweet with the intermediary category of between 5 to 9 grams per litre as off-dry.
For the everyday wine drinker these categorisations of the relative sweetness of a wine are somewhat academic. The buyer usually wants simply to know is the wine sweet or dry. New World wine producers are usually more helpful to the consumer often providing some form of symbol on the label to categorise degrees of sweetness, or, are more likely simply to have on the label sweet, semi-sweet, or, dry. Old World wine producers particularly the French are less likely to offer the consumer such help. The logic being, I think, that that if you do not know that Sauternes, for example, is a sweet wine then it is your lookout.
The popularity of sweet wines historically has waxed and waned. In Europe in the 18th and 19th Century’s sweet wines was all the rage, at least within the courts of the aristocracy and among the elites. Part of the explanation relates to the then scarcity of sugar and natural sweetness in any food was much prized. After the Second World War wine consumption began to move away from only the drink of two extremes; either a drink of the peasants or the tipple of the rich. Prosperity and the rise of the urban middle classes provided new and much larger markets for wine. By the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s sophisticated urbanites were moving towards a preference for dry wines. Why this preference away from sweet wines happened is open to much speculation and interpretation, but perhaps was noting more than fashion.
Humans have a penchant, if not a physical craving for all things sweet. The positive response babies’ display to sweet food is dramatic and early exposure to high levels of sugar in the diet can create cravings, if not an addiction, that many find difficult in later life to kick. This human preference for sugar as well as fat forms the basis of one of the world’s most successful industries, being fast food in all its guises. It is then no coincidence that the most successful brand of wine in the world, the Australian Yellow Tail labels, (annual sales of around 400 million litres), has relatively high levels of residual sugar. Again, this is no coincidence as cleaver marketing folk know full well that consumers, particularly those new to wine drinking, respond favourably in blind tastings to a degree of residual sugar in their wines.
There are several ways to produce a sweet wine. Natural sweetness is a function of the ripeness of a grape when picked. In northern Europe producing grapes which are fully ripe, meaning with sufficient sugar content, has historically been somewhat hit-and-miss due to the vagaries of the climate. Many European wine producers are in some ways happy that global warming may be changing this situation to produce far less inconsistent vintages than historically has been the case. European wine makers are still allowed to add sugar, or, more precisely grape must, prior to the fermentation process not to increase sweetness, but to provide the food for the yeast for the wine to ferment to a sufficient alcoholic strength. This addition of grape must is known as Chapilization named after a French chemist Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal in the mid-18th Century.
A “natural” way to produce a sweet wine is through desertification of the grape. This can be achieved either through using raisins, dried grapes, which by reducing the water content of the grape increases the relative sugar content. Another way is through a fungal infection called botrytis cinerea. This bacterial infection on the skin of the grape has the effect of educing rot, the process is commonly called noble rot, and reducing the water content in the grape and therefore again increasing the relative sugar content. The other natural way of increasing the sugar content of the grape is through picking the grapes when they are frozen. Ice wine as it is called is based on the principle that water freezes at a higher temperature than the phenolics properties of the grape, including the sugar content.
The other way to produce a sweet wine is to stop the fermentation process before all the sugars in the wine have been converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The good folk of the Douro valley in Portugal do this to their Port wines adding a grape spirit to the wine before fermentation has been completed. This has the effect of retaining the residual sugar content of the wine and importantly bumping the alcoholic strength to around 18% volume.
In Kenya the shelves of the supermarkets have plenty of off-dry or sweet wines. From Chile there are the products of the Frontera label part of the Concha Y Toro Company with their sweet wine offerings. At about 15 grams per litre and alcohol of 15% by volume and a price tag of KSH700 (US$9.00) it has proved a popular seller. Interestingly the wine has no vintage on the label indicating that it may well be a blend of wines from a variety of vintages and areas of Chile. How the sweetness is achieved is also not indicated on the label, but it maybe as simple as adding grape must to the final product prior to bottling.
From South Africa there are a variety of products that fall into the sweet wine category. The wine company Douglas Green have a label called St. Celine, marketed as a Natural Sweet Red, at around 15% alcohol and like its Chilean counterpart also a non-vintage. Douglas Green in my opinion has a sophisticated marketing strategy and quick off the mark when it comes to recognising the consumer preferences for slightly sweet wine. They have their labels St. Anna, Natural Sweet, 8% alcohol, (KSH499) and St Claire, Natural Sweet Red, 8% alcohol, which again cleverly recognise consumer moves to sweeter and less alcohol in their wines. For the Old World the French through the J.P Chenet company offer a Medium Sweet white, as well as a Medium Sweet Red 2008 at around KSH779 a bottle. Not to be left out the Italians are promoting the label Mama Mia Naturally Sweet, White, Vaglie at 12% alcohol at about KSH439, (US$6.00), a bottle. The label unashamedly leans on the Italian expression and the hit of the pop group ABBA. I have tasted this wine and the expression, “Mama Mia”, seems particularly appropriate.
