Wine · 3.2

Why North Carolina wine is sweeter than newcomers expect

It follows from the grape and from the acid rather than from a lack of ambition, and it is exactly what chocolate wants.

For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, this Monitask guide offers a concise companion guide.

Visitors from wine regions elsewhere often find the wine here sweeter than they expected and read that as a lack of ambition. It is not, and the reasons are worth separating because they are different.

The grape

Muscadine fermented dry is a difficult wine. The musky aromatics that are pleasant against residual sugar read as strange without it, the acidity is high, and the thick skins contribute a firm tannin.

Sugar balances all three. Left with some residual sweetness, the same wine is coherent, and producers arrived at that by tasting rather than by marketing.

The acid

Wines grown in warm humid conditions are often picked with higher acid than the sugar level would suggest, and sweetness is the ordinary counterweight to acid in any wine anywhere.

A German riesling and a coastal muscadine are doing the same thing for the same reason, and only one of them is treated as a serious wine by people who have not tasted the other.

The preference

Regional taste is real and it is circular. Sweet wine sold well here, so producers made it, so people grew up with it, so it sold well. That loop is neither a defect nor a fixed fact, and it has been loosening for two decades as drier styles have appeared.

Dry muscadine exists

Several producers make it, and it is worth trying precisely because it is the harder version. Expect something austere and aromatic that resembles nothing else, and expect to need a second glass before deciding what you think.

It is also the version that pairs least well with chocolate, for the reason the sugar rule gives, which is an inconvenient fact for a festival and true anyway.

And the other half of the state

The wines from the piedmont and the foothills are mostly European varieties made dry, in styles a visitor from California or Europe will recognise immediately. Cabernet franc, chardonnay, viognier and others do well there.

If somebody's objection is that they do not like sweet wine, the answer is not to argue but to point them at the other half of the state's production, which exists in quantity and is served at the same tables.

Reading the sweetness off a label

Rarely possible directly. Terms like dry, semi-sweet and sweet are not regulated in a way that makes them comparable between producers, and a wine described as semi-sweet by one is drier than another's dry.

Alcohol gives a hint in one direction: a low figure often means fermentation was stopped with sugar remaining. It is a hint rather than a rule, since sweetness can also be added after fermentation.

The reliable method at a tasting is to ask, and the people pouring answer this question dozens of times an evening without minding.

What this means for the pairing

The state's characteristic wine is sweet and the sugar rule says a sweet wine is what chocolate wants. That is a fortunate alignment and it is why the premise of this festival works better here than the same premise would in a region making only dry reds.

The corollary is that the dry wines on the floor need dark chocolate and the sweet ones can take anything, which is a route through the room rather than a rule about quality.

The thing worth not doing

Treating sweetness as a measure of seriousness. Some of the most prized wines in the world are sweet, they are expensive, and nobody describes them as unambitious.

The judgement people are actually making is about familiarity, and it is worth noticing that about oneself before saying it out loud at somebody's table.

What residual sugar actually is

Sugar left in the wine because fermentation was stopped or because the yeast could not finish. It is measured in grams per litre and almost never printed on a label in this country.

Roughly, under about four grams reads as dry to most people, around ten to twenty as off-dry, and anything above about forty-five is unmistakably sweet. Those boundaries are approximate and they shift with acidity: a high-acid wine with twenty grams can taste drier than a low-acid wine with twelve.

Which is the point

Sweetness is not a number, it is a balance between the sugar and the acid, and the same figure produces different impressions in two different wines.

Anybody comparing wines by residual sugar without also knowing the acidity is comparing half of the thing, which is why the reliable approach at a table is still to taste it.

The question to ask

Not is it sweet, which invites a one-word answer that may not match your scale. Ask where it sits between the driest and the sweetest thing on their table.

That question gives the person pouring something they can answer precisely, and it gives you a comparison rather than an adjective.

The short version

Sweetness here follows from the grape and from the acid, not from a lack of ambition, and it happens to be exactly what chocolate wants.

What has been changing

Drier styles of muscadine have appeared steadily over the past two decades, as producers found an audience for them and as techniques for handling the aromatics improved.

The result is that a tasting table here now often carries the same grape in two or three sweetness levels, which is the most useful thing that can happen to a visitor forming an opinion: the variable is isolated and everything else is held constant.

Also in this part

• 1.1

  Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight

  The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.

  Read it →
• 1.2

  Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth

  Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

  Read it →

For further context, see OIV wine standards.