Estimating White Wine Sweetness

There is a rough guide to assessing how sweet a wine may be. That guide is simply the percentage alcohol, which is listed on the bottle.

For what it is worth, if the alcohol content is less than, say 11%, then the wine is more likely to be sweet. A 9% value is quite sweet.

This guide has worked well on white wines.

The rational is simple, the lower the alcohol value means that the sugar has not been converted to alcohol.

Hi Blair Zajac,

le Tue, 03 Jul 2001 22:36:18 -0700, tu disais:-

Hmm. And how about Sauternes, Monbazillacs, Muscats, Ports, Tokaji Aszus? Most of these have 13-14% alcohol and can be extremely sweet.

In fact, this only holds true for German or German style wines, and even then is not always the case. But I do know what you mean.

Without much technical knowledge it would seem that this rational assumes all grape juice has the same amount of sugar. Obviously that makes the Sauternes, Monbazillacs and Coteaux du Layon ringers and the sweet desert muscats have alcohol added to stop the fermentation if I recall the process of making a natural sweet wine

Hi Robert ,

Thu, 05 Jul 2001 22:22:41 -0400, tu commented:-

Exactly, and that's the point I was trying to make.

My point entirely. And while some of the producers still use chaptalisation, I see signs of a move towards a ban on it for better sweet