Once again, my wonderful friend Scriptoress asked an excellent question about how to talk about sugar levels in wine. While brix refers to the sugar levels in grapes before, during and after harvest, the way to discuss the sweetness in a finished wine is to talk about residual sugar (RS).
Sugar remains in wine, usually, in one of two ways. One is by choice--a winemaker can change the temperature of a wine--either cooling or heating the wine--during fermentation to kill or stall the yeast from converting the sugars into alcohol. Another is naturally, resulting in stuck fermentation. Due to natural temperature changes, or just chance factors, the yeast may stop converting. At that point, the sugar you have is what you get in the finished product.
Thus, the sugars that remain in the wine after the fermentation process finishes are the residual sugars, which cause the sweetness in wine. Dry wines will have no or close to no residual sugars, dessert wine will have a high level of RS.
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4 comments:
Raise your hand if you love blogging shout-outs!
Man do I love hyperlinking. Every time you ask an excellent question, I am surely going to mention your genius blog.
Thanks to you and your mum for asking questions!
Dear YoungVintage, when am I going to learn more about wine?
Crazy work week--I will post again soon. I'm so happy that you look forward to reading the blog!
:)
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