Morrisons The Best Primitivo, Puglia, Italy 2021 (£8.75, Morrisons) The wine business has a messed-up relationship with sugar. Too often, it’s used as an easy way to disguise shortcomings of flavour. A few grams of sugar will gloss over harsh acidity and rough tannins. Thanks to this year’s changes in the way duty is calculated, with wines below 11% charged at lower rates, the stealthy sweetening of wines has been getting even worse. One of the ways winemakers can keep alcohol levels down is to choose not to ferment all the sugar into alcohol, which can lead to a kind of greasy patina of sweetness. Which is not to say sugar is always a bad thing. Some styles, such as the bittersweet reds of Puglia – of which Morrisons Primitivo is a good example – have the tang and natural dark-berried richness to balance the extra sugar beautifully.
Gunderloch On The QT Bin 34: The Hawaiian Reserve Riesling, Germany 2018 (£17.99, Waitrose) Two rather nebulous words – balance and naturalness – are the ones I turn to when I want to explain why I find some sweeter wines joyful and others the definition of synthetic. The best analogy I can think of is jam and the vast difference between a fruit-laden homemade preserve and a bottom-shelf supermarket value-range jar. A wine such as Gunderloch’s tropically fruited and racy Hawaiian Reserve Riesling is very much in the former category. At just 10% it’s a light wine, but such is the effortless intensity of fruit it doesn’t feel light and it would measure up well to all kinds of mildly spicy and sweet-sour foods (including the Hawaiian cuisine prepared by “an undisclosed Hawaiian celebrity chef” that Waitrose says it was originally designed to match).
Taste the Difference Sweet Pedro Ximenez, Jerez, Spain NV (£9, 50cl, Sainsbury’s) Another word that seems important is transparency. It would be good to know, for example, that a wine such as Morrisons’ Primitivo has 11.5g of sugar per litre, which is 10g more than the same retailer’s Chianti Classico. Unlike with food, however, wine producers are under no obligation to let us know. For most of us, opening a wine that’s sweeter (or drier) than we expect is no more than a gustatory annoyance; for those of watching our weight or monitoring sugar levels for diabetes, it’s more serious. For now, we have to rely on a mixture of guess work, although Sainsbury’s couldn’t be clearer about flagging up one of the key features of their intensely sweet PX sherry: a thick, treacly delight made from sundried grapes that tastes of molasses and has a teeth-tingling 385g sugar per litre.
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