Monday, Sep. 15, 2008

How sweet is that wine? An answer

By Dan Berger, Wine Press Northwest

As dozens of wineries around the United States consider whether to leap into the Riesling derby, following the huge success of Chateau Ste. Michelle with that variety, one of the linchpins on which decisions are based is: Can I sell this wine?

And the ability to sell many white wines is whether the consumer will favor the amount of sweetness in the wine.

Riesling is a grape that, to many people, sounds like it's going to be sweet. Some believe it will be very sweet. Some wine snobs even think Riesling is for wimps because of its sugar. And such pedantic folks would never take the time to learn about really dry Rieslings.

So it seems apt that the newly formed International Riesling Foundation (IRF), with firm support from wineries around the world, has released the Riesling Taste Profile, a two-sided system for identifying the sweetness in wines from member wineries.

IRF, which was first talked about in an informal meeting at Chateau Ste. Michelle in June 2007, asked me to come up with the guidelines on sweetness, understanding that what is at play here more than just sugar is also how much acid is in the wine, what its pH is, and other factors. I worked with a number of winemakers for guidance and drew up a five-point sweetness chart.

Members then said they believed that three levels of sweetness might work, and at one point we toyed with a six-point suggestion, understanding that such a plan was simpler than was a 10-point sweetness scale used in Canada.

After months of wrangling, the sweetness scale finally approved by the IRF board now uses four basic terms - "dry," "medium dry," "medium sweet" and "sweet" - to define various levels of perceived sweetness. By perceived sweetness, we refer to the fact that one wine with 1% residual sugar may taste sweet to most tasters, and that another wine with 2% residual sugar could well taste dry to most tasters.

It all depends on the acid and pH.

To illustrate the problems and define the wines for winemakers and marketers, IRF has technical guidelines that it will publish and make available to the press and public. More importantly it will be sent to winemakers so they can use the information to properly categorize their wines.

IRF, a private, not-for-profit organization, was formally created last November to increase the awareness, understanding and consumption of Riesling - which is the fastest-growing of all wines except Pinot Noir in the United States.

As such, the group (with members from the United States, Germany, Austria, Alsace, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere) aims to create cooperative image building for Riesling and to assist Riesling producers and trade associations.

The Riesling Taste Profile puts forth recommended guidelines that IRF thinks may be helpful in making wine consumers much more comfortable buying a bottle of Riesling. The program is entirely voluntary, and IRF believes that over time most Riesling producers will use the system.

As much as the sweetness guide is aimed at potential Riesling buyers, there is another reality. The same sort of dilemma faces those who are likely buyers of Gewurztraminer, Chenin Blanc and even such grapes as Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Albarino. They will peruse a wine list or shelf and ask, "How sweet is that wine?" In fact, if I have never heard of the producer of a wine, I will ask the same question!

It would seem logical that any producer of white wine that's likely to be slightly sweet (or more than slightly) would want the consumer to know how sweet it is (no apologies to Jackie Gleason). Imagine the problems:

A Pinot Gris producer has a slightly sweet style of the wine that appeals to his regular customers, many of whom are those who visit his tasting room and buy the wine for use minutes later at his picnic tables under the trees adjacent to the winery. Such use justifies keeping the level of the wine slightly sweet; many tasting room visitors like sweeter wines.

However, because of the high cost of gasoline, visitors to this man's tasting room decline. With fewer buyers at the tasting room, the winery has more Pinot Gris to sell than it once had, so it decides to sell the excess wine at retail. But the first-time retail consumer doesn't like the sweeter style, and the wine has no other identifier to alert those who might like such a wine.

Use of the IRF's Riesling Taste Profile – a small chart with the four key words on it along with an arrow pointing to the approximate sweetness level – would go a long way to making many white wines that much more understandable to those who need to know whether the wine is dry, slightly sweet, picnic-sweet or even sweeter than that.

I'm personally hopeful that the sweetness guidelines will be more widely used than just for Riesling. But for its intended purpose, it should help spur Riesling sales in the United States first and eventually around the world.

DAN BERGER is a nationally renowned wine writer who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif. He publishes a weekly commentary Dan Berger's Vintage Experiences (VintageExperiences.com).

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