The perception of dryness here was dry.
A normal person can’t discern a difference of 3 g/l - that’s a bit over half a sugar cube dissolved into one liter of water. That applies to a difference between 0 and 3 g/l as well as to 8 and 11 g/l. A discerning palate can be trained to differentiate a number slightly smaller than that, but not much.
And in wine, things get even more difficult when you add stuff like acidity, alcohol, fruit flavors that can add an illusion of sweetness, etc. So no, no matter how long you keep ranting on your soapbox, I’m not describing it as dry within the canon of Riesling. I’m describing it as dry as within the canon of wine and how it tastes like. A difference of 0.23% in residual sugar is something a normal palate can’t detect - especially if there is + 7 g/l titratable acidity to neutralize any sensation of sweetness.
Funny. It’s completely opposite to me. You see, the term “dry” has a very specific meaning in the wine lexicon with which the wines are classified. A wine with 4 g/l or below residual sugar is always classified as dry - basically because a normal palate can’t say any meaningful difference in the sweetness of a wine that has 0.5 g/l or 4 g/l residual sugar. Furthermore, as long as the amount of residual sugar isn’t higher than the titratable acidity by 2 g/l (in tartaric acid), the wine can be described as dry up to 9.9 g/l RS. So a wine with 9.9 g/l RS and 8 g/l TA can be described as dry (and even if most people can detect a little bit of residual sugar sweetness, almost everybody would still describe the wine as “dry”), but a wine with 9.5 g/l RS and 7 g/l TA should be described as half-dry.
If you can differentiate a difference of 1 g/l in RS - good for you, you freak of nature! However, to most people, this is way beyond the capabilities of their palate. Furthermore, you should learn to make the difference between dry and bone-dry (or some similar term to describe the extreme end of dryness and complete lack of residual sugar). Dry is a technical term widely accepted in wine terminology, which allows a tiny bit of residual sugar sweetness and I continue to use it the way everybody else is using. You are free to nitpick if somebody describes a wine bone-dry yet somebody is able to detect a tiny smidgen of residual sugar sweetness there, but you should not be complaining about the usage of the term “dry” because it has a very long history of usage in describing a certain style of wine with clear-cut numeric values which one can always refer to.
And when it comes to how I describe wines, I will continue to comment on the sweetness if it sticks out. If it doesn’t, the wine is completely in balance, any possible residual sugar is in harmony with the acidity and other components and the wine can be described as “dry” in the sense it is accepted in the larger wine world, I will say it is a dry wine. You can continue to be upset if a wine that has 3 g/l residual sugar is described as dry, but I really don’t mind and if a wine with 7 g/l RS tastes dry to me, I will happily describe it as dry.
No, I did not. It’s very rare I find RS in GG Rieslings noticeable to any extent - basically only in wines where the RS values are closer to the allowed high end (9 g/l) in warmer vintages, where the acidity is lower and the fruit flavors (more, say, peachy than lemony) tend to accentuate sweetness.
After all, it is quite typical for a wine to finish at 1 to 4 g/l RS. Even if people don’t actively think about it, almost all the wines we drink tend to have a few grams of RS in them, even the very dry ones. Getting down to below 1 g/l RS is not that common, since most wines usually can have more than 1 g/l of unfermentable sugars, which means the wine needs brettanomyces or other rogue yeasts that are capable of metabolizing more complex carbohydrates.
So even if the difference between the RS might look huge (there’s 300% more residual sugar in Battenfeld-Spanier than in Dr. Bürklin-Wolf!!!), the difference between them is just 0.23% - only 1/450 of the wine’s weight. Glucose just isn’t that sweet molecule that my palate would be able to discern this kind of difference!
Also, if I’ve described the von Winning wine having “dry flavors”, that’s what I mean. The residual sugar component might accentuate the fruit flavors so that there are more sweet-tasting flavors like pineapple, apricots or honey, but all of those could have just come from oak. We don’t have any analyses or technical details when we taste the wines and nobody really thinks about them in the moment! Rest assured, had there been a wine where the residual sugar really starts to stick out, making the wine feel more off-dry rather than dry, I would’ve commented on this in the tasting note!
