DRY Is Good, SWEET Is Yucky?

Salut/Hi Thomas Vehus,

le/on Sun, 23 Jan 2005 14:47:20 +0100, tu disais/you said:-

I'm truly not sure. I've had an entire menu of 10 courses, from scallops in a cardamom flavoured jelly to a sumptuous desserts, including foie gras and blue cheese, all accompanied by sweet wines. OK, it was done to prove a point, but if you restrict dry wines to the (sort of legal) definition of

Hi guys

Just one question:

Regards Ray

I can offer no stats, but I believe a lot of unsophisticated wine drinkers still like sweeter wines.

Then there are the sophisticates who realise this and despise sweet wines, which probably leads to people expressing preferences for dry wines, even if they really like sweet ones.

I might be wrong here but I suspect there is residual suger in a lot of cheap wines that do not advertise this fact. It appeals to the masses and disguises poor wine. Such wines woudl appeal to both of the above groups.

Me? I like both, for different occasions, but tend to drink more dry wines.

You'll have to differenciate. While 99 percent of the wines I drink are dry, that doesn't mean that I cannot accept or judge the quality of a sweet wine. Dryness or sweetness is not a sign of quality per se (as your friend apparently believes), it's just a style. There are good and bad dry wines as there are good and bad sweet wines.

Thus said, I'd walk miles for a Robert Weil Auslese!

M.

I think Steve is on right track. What happens is mostly this: Many people (in New World at least) get their first impressions of wine from sweet or semi-sweet cheap wines( white Zinfandel, for instance). As they try more wines, they realize (and are told) that the more expensive (dry) wines they try are better. They associate the sweetness with the lack of quality. They convince themselves that they don't like sweet wines, and immediately associate any hint of sugar with cheapness. In reality, while many cheap wines are sweet, sweetness itself is is no indicator of quality. There are great dry wines, great off-dry wines (top German Kabinetts), great sweet wines, great intensely sweet wines. There are crappy wines produced at all levels of sweetness too.

Dry whites matches with more foods than off-dry and sweet wines. Is that not correct?

I think the origina post was referring to "cheap" sweet wines such as those that one used to find on the market.

Sweet wines make everything more difficult, but the results can be stunning.

First, you need to find some great sweet wines, and they tend to be expensive. Any sweet wine under $30 is probably made by "cheating", you want something from true late vintage or botrytis, with lots of acidity and plenty of terroir. Ice wines, even good ones, are perhaps the hardest to match, I don't bother. Botrytis adds the kind of complexity that one wants in order to open up the creative possibilities for food matches, and IMHO these are the best wines to play with.

While these wines are perfect on their own, some of us have taken to the challenge of matching them to food. The matches tend to be very focused, they require a lot of experimenting, a lot of tuning, but once you get it right it can be breathtakingly successful; a slight change in the balance of spices can ruin everything though, so there is no easy recipe, you just have to experiment.

There are no rules. Some guidelines might help. Avoid fat foods with sweet wine, they tend to make a nasty mix with sugar; foie gras can be married with sweet wines, but not as easily as the press might want you to think. Salty spicy foods can create peasant contrasts to the sweet acidity of great sweet wines. Oysters and Yquem are supposed to be wonderful, that is what Lur Saluces told me, and I can only believe him. I find Japanese cooking lends itself to experiments with sweet wine.

Cheers

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Not sure I agree. I've never tasted anything better than w correctly cooked fois gras coupled with a great Sauterne. Just had one last Saturday that blew me away.

Much Sauternes lacks in acidity and so creates a strange mix with fat. It is much easier to match a pinot gris from Alsace or a good Loire sticky. In Sauternes, Yquem is of course an easy if expensive choice. Some Barsac minor labels do very well.

De gustibus...

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

They don't necessarily.

Wrong. I like both. Which I drink at any given time depends on what food I'm drinking it with. For my taste, dry wines go better with most of what I eat, so I drink many more dry wines than sweet ones. But that doesn't mean that I don't like sweet wines.

I think there are are three reasons for the perception that sweet wines are inferior to dry ones:

1. The foods that most people drink wine with are usually better with dry wines than whites.
2. I'm not sure what's available where you live (SG is Singapore, right?) but here in the US, much of the sweet wine that's available falls into two groups: the very cheap high-alcohol stuff made to be sold to the wino who drinks this stuff from a hip flask, and considerably more expensive stuff like vintage port, trockenbeernauslese, and fine sauternes. Not to say there's nothing in-between, but that there's comparatively little of it.

So the public's perception of sweet wine is based on what it knows. It doesn't often know the expensive dry wines, because of their price, and the cheap wines it has tasted are justly ignored for being very poor.

1. Dry wine is marketed to the yuppies who are willing to pay high prices for it. They are told that it's suave and sophisticated to drink it. Night-train Express, Ripple, etc. is marketed to the wino, who is told that he will get a big kick out of it. Most people who can afford to choose prefer the former image to the latter.

Hi Ray I think part of the problem with sweet wines (which I love if it's the right wine at the right time) is the overpowering nature of concentrated sugars. In a balanced degustation meal of 10 courses & wines to match, it would be unusual to have more than 2 sweet courses as it would be unusual to have more than 2 sweet wines. We tend to eat dessert at the end of a meal as the sugar can blunt our appetite & palate, to this end then we would drink 5 to 1 dry wines to sweet. Not an unusual ratio I would think. So dry wines do get drunk a lot more often and not just because of fashion (though there are a great many wine tragics of course) Cheers Andrew

It's very simple: Dry wines are for drinking with food. Sweet wines are dessert wines.

Bingo. I was just reading that Gallo's Red Bicyclette blend is made sweeter for the U.S. and dryer for the European market. One could argue that the European is a more sophisticated market overall, and while a wine being slightly sweeter doesn't in itself make it worse, the more sophisticated palate would be put off if they were buying what they thought was a dry wine and instead got an off-dry, where the less sophisticated palate accepts what is in the glass. There is a quote from somewhere that Americans talk about wanting dry, but secretly prefer sweet (off dry). Which brings me to that vast middle ground between bone-dry and dessert wines: off-dry wines at their various levels pair stunningly with certain foods and are appreciated (when made well) to be amongst the finest of wines e.

Hi,

Without trying to sound negative, I have to note that the consumers of Gallo's Red Bicyclette blend in Europe would hardly be representatives of the sophisticate consumer, whether in the US or Europ.

Cheers

You said it Mike! One of my favourite foods with less acidic sweet wines is the spicy Indian snack "Bhujia".

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was a sommelier in a top restaurant here in Vienna, we frequently had American patrons that wanted their wine "dry, but not too dry" (an oyxmoron, of course). I regularly served them a 1981 Riesling Spätlese (Winzer Krems) with solid 20 grams of RS. They invariably were totally delighted.

M.

My tastes are very skewed in favor of semi-sweet to very sweet wines, to my palate what others call semi-sweet are quite dry. Although I have had dry whites with food, most preperations work better with off dry German reisling than with dry Chardonnay or others. I never drink dry wines on their own and no dry wine has ever thrilled me.

skrev i melding news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

Proving that dessert is not food. Anders

Anders, everyone, PULLLEEEEEZZZZ don't keep feeding the T (or I).

Almost 50% of traffic is coming from this kind of lax attitude, please rigorously RESIST the temptation, many of us are getting quite fed up.

We need your help. Grit your teeth and skip it.

I implore you all.

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link