Why we stopped chasing "dry"

For about three years, we made every batch as dry as we could possibly push it. We back-sweetened nothing. We added no sugar. We watched the hydrometer drop to 0.992 and felt smug. Dry, we believed, was correct. Dry was serious. Dry was what real winemakers made.

Then one day Russ's wife — Karen, who is more honest than either of us deserves — said, 'You know I don't actually like this, right?' And the wine, in that moment, became less about being correct and more about being something you actually wanted to drink.

What 'dry' actually means

Dry, in winemaker terms, just means the yeast ate basically all the sugar. The hydrometer reads under 1.000. There is essentially no residual sweetness. That's it. It is a measurement, not a quality grade. A dry wine is not inherently better than a slightly off-dry wine. It is just less sweet.

Most of the great wines you've actually loved are not bone dry. Most commercial reds have between two and eight grams of residual sugar per liter. You can't taste it as 'sweet' — you taste it as 'rounder,' 'smoother,' 'less aggressive.' That softness is what you've been calling 'expensive' your whole life.

Why we were chasing it anyway

Insecurity, mostly. A vague sense that sweet wine was unserious. The internet kept telling us that good winemakers make dry wine and bad winemakers compensate with sugar. So we made wine for an imaginary judgmental winemaker who has, to this day, never once shown up at our basement door.

Meanwhile our actual customers — the friends and spouses and neighbors who actually drank what we made — kept gently not finishing their glasses. We chose, for three years, to interpret this as their problem. It was not their problem.

What we do now

We let the wine ferment dry. Then we taste it. Then, often, we back-sweeten just a little — somewhere between five and fifteen grams of sugar per liter, which is barely perceptible as sweetness but does enormous work for mouthfeel. The wine is still technically a 'dry red.' It just no longer feels like an accusation.

We use a simple sugar syrup or a small amount of unfermented grape juice concentrate. We taste as we go. We stop when it tastes like wine we actually want to pour for a friend. That's the test. That's the whole rubric now.

The thing nobody tells beginners

There is a phase of this hobby where you will care a lot about being technically correct. You will care about Brix and pH and titratable acidity and free SO2. Care about those things. They matter. And then, at some point, you will pour a glass for someone you love and watch their face. That face is also a measurement. The hydrometer doesn't read it. But it's there. And it's the one that actually matters.