Residual Sweetness / Sweetness

(See also: Dry / Trocken / Sec, Medium-Dry / Feinherb / Demi-Sec)

As the American wine merchant and writer says, “sweetness in wine is never a problem in wine as long as there isn’t too little or too much!” None of the sweetness in the wines of Gut Hermannsberg or of the other leading wine producers of the Nahe was added. Instead, it is residual grape sweetness that was not converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide during alcoholic fermentation. There are two main types of sugar in wine grapes, glucose and fructose (50/50 by weight). During alcoholic fermentation the yeast first consume the glucose, then the fructose. This means when there are just a few grams per liter of sweetness in our dry wines, which is often the case, these are pure fructose and pose no danger to diabetics. Even those few grams of fructose accentuate the fruit aromas in white wine and help tame the wine’s acidity. This balance is even more fundamental to the off-dry wines of the Kabinett and  medium-sweet Spätlese categories of Prädikatswein.