🍷 Medium-sweet wine

Medium-sweet wine is clearly sweet, but dessert wines are sweeter still. Under European Union rules it holds from 12 to 18 up to 45 grams of sugar per litre. The lower limit depends on acidity: the more acidic the wine, the more sugar it can hide.

Where does the sweetness come from? Sometimes fermentation is stopped early, and part of the grape sugar stays in the wine. Sometimes the grapes are picked late. In medium-sweet wines sweetness is balanced by acidity, so they do not feel cloying.

Other categories stand next to it. Medium-dry wine is drier, and sweet wine is sweeter. In France a similar wine is called moelleux, in Germany lieblich, in Italy amabile. All these words describe roughly the same thing: a soft, clearly sweet wine.

On a label the word medium-sweet is looked for in the sugar line. This is useful if you want to choose a wine by taste. As with any alcohol, it should be drunk in moderation.