TWO SAINTS WINERY

 HOW SWEET IS YOUR WINE?

Many Midwestern wines are considered too sweet for the refined palate....What makes them so sweet?  It’s all about residual sugars!  Residual sugars are unfermented sugars left in the wine or added back to the wine after primary fermentation process is completed.  Typically it is not stated nor required  on  the bottle  label. When asked, it is usually expressed  in percentage of total volume by weight.  A 3% residual sugar means 3% of the weight of the wine in the bottle is unfermented sugar.  That sugar may be fructose from the fruit or as simple as glucose, simple table sugars.   Traditional  values for different levels of residual sugars are:

Dry wine- 0% to .5% residual sugar(up 4 g/750 ml bottle, about 15 calories/bottle)
Semidry  wine-.5 % to 1.5% residual sugar (up 11 g/750 ml bottle, about 45 calories/bottle)
Semisweet wine- 1.5% to 2.5% residual sugar (up 19 g/750 ml bottle, about 75 calories/bottle)
Sweet wine- Any wine 3% and over residual sugar (22.5 g/750 ml bottle, about 90 calories/bottleor more) Some Iowa wines have stated values of 18% (up 135 g/750 ml bottle, about 540 calories/bottle). 

Why use sugar?  Many people have a sweet tooth, that allows high concentrations of sugars to make even young wines or wines of immature fruits to become palatable.   Sugars do a great job of masking the foxy flavors of certain American labrusca grapes varieties.  While we feel there is a market for overly sweet beverages,  it’s our desire to let the personality of the grape and wine be the dominant flavor in our wines. We support the concept that drinking wine in moderation can be benefical to health, however drinking high sugar wines does not offer enough health benefits to overcome the downfalls of excessive sugar consumptions. Our sweetest wine, CONFESSIONS, has a residual sugar of 5%. If you enjoy sweet wines, we suggest you ask the producer how much residual sugars are in the wine.