Wondering about your thoughts on this. Do popular corp wines like ménage a trios and Apothic and Cupcake red velvet have higher detectable RS?
What gives that profile of wine that jammy sort of sweetness.
Thanks,
Frank
I thought I read in another thread that Apothic Red had about 18-20 g/l of RS.
Is this something that’s easy to measure at home? If I pop open a bottle how would I go about determining exact amount of sugar?
Yes, all of the wines you mentioned have about 15g/L (about 1.5%) of RS. This doesn’t quite make them “sweet”, but more of a “near-sweet” red wine. Instead of being labeled as “sweet” or “near sweet” their marketing tactic is to be labeled as “red blend”. This category is greatly increasing in sales lately as well.
The “jamminess” can typically be attributed to a combination of the RS, zinfandel component of the blend (which commonly sports jammy notes), and late picking of the grapes (greater physiological ripeness). This late picking generates higher sugar levels which in turns generates higher levels of glycerol (a by product of alcoholic fermentation) and ethyl alcohol; both of which are perceived as sweet.
As an example, the 2011 vintage of Apothic red had 1.65% residual sugar.
Wow thank you, Jeff and David! Sorry Arif. I don’t know of a kit you could buy to measure RS or if that is possible for say a consumer to do if that was your question.
Thank you,
Frank
However, I’ve never seen any evidence to suggest that any of the kinds of dry wines we talk about and drink contain RS, despite it occasionally being suggested that wines like Mollydooker and Martinelli must necessarily have RS if they taste very ripe and the fruit tastes sweet.
I think instead that is just a function of ripe fruit harvested at high Brix, not because of RS, and if those wines did have meaningful RS, someone would have long since demonstrated it with measuring equipment and it would be a big story on wine boards.
To Frank’s follow-up question, you can test RS with a hydrometer, which you can buy for probably $10-15 or so at a winemaking store. It’s the device we home winemakers use to determine if our fermentations are completed.
Isn’t a hydrometer a little impercise to measure RS?
Home wine makers use the Clintest urine strips but I think even those aren’t very precise.
Presque Isle has a test kit that can do 36 RS test for $28 (+ shipping)
I think I remember another home kit but it was several dollars a test. I have thought about checking some of those grocery store reds for RS but the cost of testing didn’t seem worth it.
Lots of popular wines do have “meaningful” RS – but I wonder if it’d be scandalous on boards like this one.
The joke among winemakers in Napa is with every 10k cases of Prisoner they increase each year, they increase the RS. I’ve heard that the latest release clocks in at over 7 g/L.
For hard data, the 2012 “Meiomi” Pinot Noir from Belle Glos contains 6.22 grams/liter of sugar according to a lab test. The 2011 Caymus Napa Valley Cabernet clocks in at 4.08 grams/liter.
So neither of these wines is “dry” in any sense of the word. Indeed, the European regulatory sense of the word, wine is “dry” when under 3 g/L. (Interestingly, while most U.S. winemakers believe that “dry” is under 1 g/L RS, most European winemakers believe that “dry” is under 3 g/L.)
There’s a double-edged sword here, too. Could you imagine if there WASN’T residual sugar in Apothic or The Prisoner? The alcohols would be even higher. Plus, the sweetness in those wines elongates the palate and softens the alcohol.
My beef with these wines (and others like it) is that they’re sold and advertised as “dry,” and not just from a marketing sense. The tech sheets on these particular wines don’t mention RS even though that’s the industry standard.
At that level of RS, a hydrometer probably wouldn’t help you very much. Aside from there being no real direct correlation between the brix scale and g/L of sugar, you still could potentially have that much RS and be at or below the zero brix line anyways. Your best bet if you really feel compelled to check sugar level of wines at home (aside from investing in a home enzymatic spec/machine) is to find a home winemaking (or medical supply) store that sells Clinitest tablets. This can give you a rough RS estimate (0-0.5-1-2-3-5 %) based on looking at the color of the liquid in a test tube (you’ll need a test tube and something to hold it since the reaction is quite exothermic). Its actually a quick hospital test for measuring sugar in the urine of diabetics I believe, but like all things in the wine industry, we’ve coopted it for our own uses…
Just note that this method is only considered qualitative and is not considered an accurate, quantitative method usable for making official proclamations of a wine’s sugar content. I’m also not sure off the top of my head if it reacts with all sugars or just fermentable sugars. So consider this more of a ballparking it for your own edification method.
You could potentially use a refractometer, but the precision might be lost in trying to compensate for the alcohol. It gets kind of tricky. Plus you would have to be fairly curious to drop $50 on a refractometer.
I found this interesting posted a few months back:
https://mobile.twitter.com/jo_wells707/status/402909016843493377
Most would be shocked how many wines have RS if the numbers were run in a lab.
So, this is a little hazy but bear with me.
I was once in Stellenbosch on holiday and visited a winemaker who worked closely with an American winemaker.
It was just after vintage and we were chatting about how it went. He was lamenting the fact that the American was so strict about “dry”, insisting that the wines be <2 g/L before going to barrel for ML. He said “in that case, I have a bunch of wines that are ‘stuck’…even though all my buddies use 5 g/L as the gauge. WTF am I going to do to get them all dry?”. He and the American were only ineracting by phone and email at the time, as the American wasn’t in country.
His wines did not taste sweet to me, and I was curious so I asked him about the analytical side of it.
Turns out (and this is where it’s all fuzzy), he was testing for more types of sugars. In the US, we focus on reducing sugars, specifically glucose and fructose, which easily (well, usually easily) get to under 2 g/L and most of us look for <1 g/L as “dry”. I can’t for the life of me recall the techniques he used, nor what additional types of sugar his methods picked up, but essentially it was very unusual to have them all add up to <4ish g/L.
So, what winemakers look for analytically and the methodology can influence what is “dry” by strict numbers.
Great stuff thanks. So with those 3 wines I mentioned and knowing a lot of people like them, is there other less known brands from smaller producers say from countries like Italy, Spain or Australia for example that have a similar profile you could recommend to someone you know who likes that style of wine. I know we are talking about an entry level wine enthusiast.
I think if it’s under 10 g/l it’s considered “dry” isn’t it?
Humans can detect sweetness somewhere around 2 g/l, depending on the person and time of day. However, when tasting, we pick up additional implications of sweetness from fruit and alcohol and even vanillin from oak, all of which we interpret as “sweet”. As far as I know, Ménage à Trois Red and Apothic Red each supposedly have only about 1.5% residual sugar, but that’s amped up by the fruitiness and alcohol and touch of vanilla.
Those wines however, are a category of wine that has become the hottest category in the market over the past 2 years. Moscato became really hot but this sweetish category has surpassed that.
It’s also bringing new wine drinkers into the market. Some of the wines actually say “sweet” on the bottle, others just are, but they’re higher in RS than most wine drinkers want their wines to be, although that’s not really fair since the people who love those wines would also be wine lovers. They’re loving Cupcake, Apothic, Black Box, Barefoot, House Jam, Jam Jar, Bluefish, Red Curtain and a lot of others.
When other producers saw what happened with Two Buck Chuck and Yellowtail, they decided to put out their own versions.
Nobody knows for sure, but the purchasers of those wines are thought to be mostly females and hispanics.
Gallo published the data sheet on apothic, 2008 is 1.7g/100mL or 17g/L
Brig got the data sheet from the Gallo tasting room on his last tour – as a member of the “Apothic Red Zone” wine club, he gets free tours and other benefits.
“Dry” is a squishy term and means different things to different people, but most winemakers I know have a different term for a fermentation that stops at 10 g/L: “stuck”…usually preceded by the -ing adverb form of a colorful word that rhymes with “stuck”
Here’s a picture from the tour of the tasting room in downtown Fresno.
The usual measure of dryness is less than 2g/L, in my experience. The usual threshold for tasting RS is said to be 5g/L, although I would bet that most experienced tasters can taste 3-4g pretty easily, depending on the other components of the wine, especially acidity. It’s worth noting that there are always some unfermented sugars left in wine, so ‘bone dry’ is never 0g.
Just to be clear, ‘only’ 1.5% RS is 15 g/L, which is a lot, particularly for red wine. Markham Merlot used to be 10g/L and that was thought to be a lot; one of the original marketers of the ‘talk dry, drink sweet’ school of winemaking was Kendall Jackson, and their Chardonnay is usually around 7g/L, I believe, half as much.
Deliberately using RS to market wine is not just a new world phenomenon, either. I was tasting with a Lugana producer last year at Vinitaly; the wine smelled great, but had obvious RS on the palate, maybe 7g/L. I asked him why, and he said ‘you can’t sell dry wine in Italy these days.’ I know he’s wrong, but still…