Rating Wines for Sweetness
How important is the sweetness of a wine when determining if you want to buy it? I think about this normally only when I’m considering a dessert wine or a wine I want to serve as an aperatif before a meal.
There is a wine writer and reviewer who thinks it’s pretty important. In fact, so important that he has a special code he puts in his reviews to alert readers to the sweetness level in the wine. There is no special code for value. No special code for tannin. No special code for ageability. No special code for what food to pair it with. Just a code for sweetness.
Taylor Eason has been writing about wine for Creative Loafing Magazine for some time now. He writes well and his stories are interesting and well thought out. He knows his audience well. At the end of each article he reviews two or three wines, gives them 1-5 stars for quality, then….there is the Sweetness Rating, scored I believe on a 1-5 scale with 5 being the sweetest.
We expect our table wine to be dry, and for the most part it usually is. Some wines have more residual sugar than others and if it’s a higher percent you tend to encounter it in the body of the wine. Then there are those wines, both red and white, that have noticeable levels of residual sugar. This is no mistake in winemaking. It’s meant to be there either to beef up the body or to give the sweet toothes out there something to cling to. Yet I’d never thought of designing a reviewing system to account for levels of sweetness. I like.
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