What Dry and Off-Dry Means in Wine Plus the Other Sugar Descriptors

Wine laws and wine bottle labelling rules and regulations are definitely known for their difficulty. Before some serious wine Ed, I remember standing in the aisle at the liquor store in puzzlement of many wine bottle labels. The funny thing, though, is that when you finally get to understand the labels, you see how they can really help you ensure you are leaving your wine store with the wine you really intended.

One of the things I have found wine labels immensely helpful with is sugar levels. There is nothing worse than taking home a German Riesling with the expectation of a dry wine with crisp and refreshing acidity but ending up with an off-dry wine with noticeable residual sugar. Off-dry Rieslings are excellent too, but NOT when I was really looking for something else, something dry and bursting with acidity.

That mix up points to the biggest misconception out there that fruity means sweet. It doesn't. A wine can be bursting with cherry, peach, or tropical fruit character and still be completely dry, because those flavours come from aromatic compounds in the grape, not from sugar. Sugar and fruit flavour are two separate things entirely, and once that clicks, a lot of wine labels suddenly make a lot more sense.

Residual Sugar Scale in Wine

First, let's start with what Residual Sugar means. During fermentation, yeast consumes the natural sugars in grape juice and converts them into alcohol. Whatever sugar is left over once fermentation stops, whether that's because the yeast ran out of food or the winemaker intentionally halted the process, is called Residual Sugar. The table below outlines how much residual sugar you can expect in your wine, should it be labelled as Dry, Off-dry, and so on. A good thing to note and to help put the table in perspective is that the average wine we consume has about 4 g/l residual sugar.

​Sugar Classification found on labels and wine descriptions	Residual Sugar in Grams Per Litre
Dry	up to 9 g/l
Off-dry	​9 to 18 g/l
Semi-sweet	18 to 50 g/l
Medium-sweet	50 to 120 g/l
Sweet	120+ g/l

Worth noting too, there is no such thing as a completely sugar free wine. Yeast can never consume every last bit of sugar in the grape juice, so even the driest bottle on the shelf carries a trace of residual sugar, usually somewhere between half a gram and two grams per litre. It's just so far below what our palates can detect that it registers as fully dry.

This is exactly why a Gamay or a Grenache can taste like it's overflowing with red fruit and still be bone dry on this scale. The fruit forward character comes from the grape itself and the winemaking, not from leftover sugar sitting in the bottle.

To recap, if a wine tastes juicy and fruity, don't assume that means sweet. Check the label, or better yet, just ask. Moreover, using the chart above, you'll have another weapon in your arsenal as you go about your day selecting delicious wines from your local store!

Cheers