One’s perception of both sweetness and acidity are completely interdependent. I attended a components tasting at a wine lab in Napa once many years ago where they manipulated both elements in a neutral wine. That really drove the point home. If you lower the acidity, a wine with the same RS will taste sweeter. Conversely, if you raise the RS, it will taste less acidic. I don’t think there’s anyway that you could peg the RS of a wine by taste without knowing the acidity (or, probably, even knowing it). And, as I said above, at higher alcohol levels, the alcohol can lend an apparent sweetness, too.
2008 Von Lovenstein Schieferterrassen
Surely above 9g/l but lovely balanced by delicious acidity. Very appealing
The Lovenstein wines have their own attractive nose and flavours
A wines contact with lees will also impact the mouthfeel in a manner similar to RS, so that a technically dry wine (0.0) may taste sweet.
One’s perception of both sweetness and acidity are completely interdependent.
I would expand that. Pretty much all of our perceptions of taste are completely interdependent. As Todd points out, mouthfeel is going to influence what we perceive as sweet, so will oak, so will what Sparky calls “fruit weight”, so will the type of fruit we perceive - e.g. black cherries vs green apple, so will the type of acidity - e.g. malic vs lactic, so will the alcohol, and so on. Of course in a “natural” wine all those things will just sort themselves out automatically.
But back to Jay’s question - “trocken” isn’t just a made-up word if you simply define it as a max sugar level combined with a particular sugar/acid ratio, but our perception of “trocken” may vary considerably from wine to wine and person to person. Years ago I was really puzzled because I’d drink something marked trocken and I swore it was kind of sweet. Finally I figured that I’d just learn which producers I liked and leave it at that.
I am looking to understand how to judge if a Riesling style wine is dry enough for my taste. I do not generally like Rieslings but when ive had those labelled trocken I enjoy them tremendously as in simple terms they lean towards my dry reference style which is Chablis. Now of course the wines are different buy they have similar aspects in terms of being dry with some level of acidic minerality.
Reading this thread im educated but still nearer to really understanding how to numerically identify a non trocken labeled Riesling as being similar in style, say an Austrian or Alsatian rielsing which could by design be very trocken like
Any thoughts appreciated
A percent solution (i.e. 0.9%) is always expressed as grams per 100ml. So a 0.9% solution is 0.9 grams/100ml or 9 grams/1000ml or liter.
Drink Austrian, and you are much more likely to get a dry wine that tastes dry.
Alsace is a crap shoot. This thread has explained the vagaries of German trockens.
Unfortunately with most German Rieslings labelled “trocken” you cannot know for sure if it´s closer to 9gr/l or as low as ~4gr …
An indication can be: the higher the alc. the higher is the probability that it´s tasting really dry …
14% and above means that most of the sugar is fermented to alc. …
(but there are still exceptions … and of course the vintage plays its role, too)
As David B notes, the wine will have the last say. The label won’t always tell you in advance. I’m not certain you would be able to tell the taste from the RS, acidity and ABV numbers either. They might give you an idea. Ultimately, you need to taste yourself or take advice from someone who has tasted the wine whose palate and preference for sweetness matches yours. Or find some producers who regularly produce trockens to your taste.
As others have said, there’s no perfect rule and the labels are not very helpful. But if you like a crisp style with good acidity a la Chablis, I think you’d have a pretty good hit rate with (a) most Germans labeled as Trocken, particularly from cooler areas like the Mosel, and (b) the less expensive bottlings from Alsace and Austria. In all three countries, the more expensive bottlings tend to be richer and lower in acid (or at least perception of acid) and pretty far from Chablis in style.