Dry vs. Sweet: A Sugar Showdown
Chapter 2, Lesson 5 of Drink This Now! explains an experiment to try out regarding differences in sugar. For this experiment, I grabbed one dry and one sweet Riesling. The ones I chose:
Dr. Loosen sweet Riesling (Germany) and the Dry Dam dry riesling (Australia).
As instructed, I poured each of these wines into a glass, and put the rest of the bottle into the refrigerator to chill. I didn't take any sips in the meantime (although it was tough)! After 45 minutes of chilling, I poured each of the chilled wines into their own cups for comparison. All were labeled so that confusion was eliminated.
Step 1
Step one of this experiment said to try out both of the chilled wines -- both dry and sweet. First, I started with the chilled dry wine and assessed for color, aroma and taste. This glass of wine dried out my mouth completely -- almost too much. I can't imagine eating food with this wine, because any flavor I detect seems to almost go away by how dry my mouth is after drinking it. The smell is slightly citrusy, but mostly just smells like regular white wine from my previous experience.
Next, I went to the chilled sweet wine. For this, the color, aroma and tastes were very different. This wine was definitely crisp and tasted what I'd describe as bright -- I can tell the wine is sweet, but it doesn't taste overbearing like I usually feel when I taste wine that's supposed to be extremely sweet. The chilled nature of this wine made it have almost a nice bite - extreme crisp, cool and refreshing.
I don't feel like these two wines tasted too differently -- they definitely had different hints of flavors (I detected more spice-type flavors in the dry one), but overall, I couldn't tell that one was supposed to be completely sweeter than the other.
Step 2
After this first experiment, I switched to the room temperature (warm) wines. As instructed, I didn't compare the warm wines together, but instead compared them with their cool counterpart. First, the warm, dry Riesling.
Compared to my notes from this same wine in chilled version above, the differences were that this seemed a lot more like "cat pee" than it did before... And slightly tart or even sour. The floral, or "cat pee" like taste dominates the entire flavor, unlike when it was chilled. When it was chilled, my mouth was too dry feeling to even taste any of the underlying flavors.
Next was the cool, sweet Riesling. To compare it to its counterpart, I'd say this wine chilled tasted much, much sweeter than the first time I tried it. Like I've experienced before, I did not have the best reaction to it -- it's too sweet, and the residual sugar seems to knock out the hints of it tasting minerally and very thin.
In this lesson of the book, we were advised that we might notice chilled dry wine will seem even drier than the warm dry wine, and warm sweet wine will taste even sweeter than well chilled sweet wine. This is because chilling wines should decrease the perception of sweetness, which is so true! I never thought I noticed/really cared about the temperature of wine, but this experiment changed my perceptions. As we know, the winemaker can completely manipulate the level of sweetness of wine. But it was interesting to see that the perception of the sweetness is affected by the temperature of the wine!
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