How Dry is Your January?
Dry January. For some people, it means one month without alcohol, a month that begins after a boozy New Year's Eve and ends -- 31 days of denial later -- with a bunch of corks popping.
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For me, Dry January means enjoying dry wine. We saw in 2020 how fast the world can change, so who knows what could happen in one month! I'll keep steadily enjoying my wine, thank you very much.
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And much of it will be dry wine. In short, that means without sugar.
How does wine become dry if it is made with ripe sweet grapes? Because during fermentation, little beasts called yeasts eat the sugar and turn it into alcohol. The more the yeasts eat, the drier the wine.
Think about a dessert buffet loaded with sugary pies, cakes, cookies and more. If the yeasts show up and finish the entire buffet, there is no more sugar, the buffet is dry. But if they only finish some desserts, sweetness remains.
Fermenting wine
SWEET WINE
A wine such as Deen Botrytis Semillon, for example, is very sweet--essentially dessert in a bottle.
(Botrytis refers to a mould that shrivels the grapes and concentrates the sugar even more. That allows for wine both sweet and relatively high in alcohol.)
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SEMI-SWEET
Less sweet, and boozy, is the Moscato d'Asti we talked about last year. As with the Semillon, the yeasts didn't finish all the sugar, although in this case both the sugar and alcohol levels are lower than with the Semillon.
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DRY WINE
And then there are the dry wines with no or almost no sugar. Sometimes they can trick our brain because they are fruity and seem sweet, but the sugar is long gone. Get the Tussock Jumper Monastrell, especially if one of your New Year's resolutions is to try more grape varieties.
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So, how dry is your January? As sweet as you'd like it to be.
Original by Jim Boyce, Grape Wall of China 葡萄围城
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