Dry wine

Dry wine is wine with very little residual sugar. During fermentation, the yeast converts the grapes' natural sugar into alcohol, and when almost all the sugar has fermented away, the wine is called dry. The opposite extreme is sweet wines, and in between lie levels such as off-dry and medium-sweet. For a dry white wine you are typically talking about no more than a few grams of sugar per litre, an amount most people do not perceive as sweetness in the glass at all.

This matters for what you taste. When the sugar is gone, the wine's other elements come through more clearly, especially the acidity, the fruit and, in red wine, the tannins. A dry wine often feels fresh and straightforward and pairs well with food, while the sweetness in a sweet wine cushions the impression and makes it better suited to dessert. Most everyday wines, whether white, red or rosé, are dry.

A common misunderstanding is that dry means sour or flavourless. Dry is only about sugar, not about acidity or fruit. A dry wine can easily smell intensely of ripe fruit and come across as round and generous even though it is not sweet. Conversely, a wine with a little residual sugar can still taste fresh if the acidity is high enough to balance the sweetness. If you want to know whether a wine is dry, the label can often help, and otherwise the first sip gives you the answer.