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WINEMAKING red versions. (If there's such a thing as white Merlot, there's room for red Mosca- to.) More unusual is the proliferation of sweet reds and red blends. Sure, there were always sweet reds from New York and Missouri, made from Concord and Cataw- ba, but these are mainly local brands; now the big boys are in the national distribu- tion game. Remarkably (to me at least), many of the new entries have the chutzpah to come right out and put the word sweet on the label: Barefoot Sweet Red, Sutter Home Sweet Red, Beverages and More's Mozelle Sweet Red. And let us not forget an entire brand named Cupcake. Sweetness works its magic in many ways— and at many levels. The technical definition of dry (and therefore not sweet) wine is often pegged at 0.2% (2 grams per liter) residual sugar, or at 0.4% in the EU. This fairly strin- gent standard is really a measure of wine stability, the point at which there is no more fermentable sugar to worry about. At 0.5%, most tasters can identify the presence of sweetness. From there on up, there is a murky region of off-dry/medium-dry/medium-sweet/ semi-sweet beverages, until the flat-out sweet level is reached. In the EU, fully sweet kicks in at 4.5% (45 grams per liter.) How wines in that big middle ground are actually per- "We make winemaking decisions based on the product, not simply on the grapes." —Cupcake winemaker Adam Richardson ceived depends on many other factors in wine composition, particularly the level of acidity, making a hard-and-fast criterion for "sweet" tricky. If the standard is the hard-nosed tech- nical threshold of 2 grams per liter, there's a whole lot of sweet wine in the world, and if it's 45 grams per liter, there's hardly any. Vin doux nouveau spans this entire terri- tory, from wines better described as soft or smooth to wines everyone would immediate- ly describe as sweet. At the lower end, the bits of residual sugar help smooth off the rough edges of a wine and make it go down young and easy; at the higher levels, the sweetness can be embraced (or not) on its own merits. Assuming minimally competent winemak- ing, all that sugar is there on purpose, for a good reason, almost always some variation on the theme of softening wine's impact. Hu- mans naturally love things that are sweet and instinctively spit out things that are bitter, astringent or sour. It takes years of practice The 2012 Wines & Vines Directory & Buyer's Guide It's Here: INTUITIVE SEARCH 17 SECTIONS DIGITAL EDITION Order today Or learn more at www.winesandvines.com/bglearnmore (866) 453-9701 www.winesandvines.com 48 Wines & Vines JUne 2012 ACCURATE DATA