The first thing most people think of when it comes to adding something to a wine is winemaking or blending, but that’s not really the case. What we are trying to say is that it is added during the winemaking process, not at the end before bottling. These are two very different things. Adding sugar, adding acid or reducing sugar and acid are actually methods that winemakers use in the winemaking process to get a better wine product. Let’s see what’s happening today.
In both red and white wines, winemakers decide during the fermentation stage whether to add new sugar, new acid, reducing sugar, reducing acid, or to increase the concentration of the must.
In some wine producing regions, new sugars are added to the must during fermentation to increase the alcohol content of the wine, provide more energy to the must in the blended state, and facilitate the conversion of more sugars to alcohol, which does not increase the sweetness of the wine.
This process is necessary for under-ripe grapes (which do not readily ripen to sufficient maturity in relatively cold production areas), but currently, due to global warming and more efficient vineyard management techniques, sufficiently ripe grapes are becoming available in more and more vintages with less and less added sugar.
In relatively warm regions, winemakers should not worry about adding sugar because the grapes are not ripe enough, but they should worry about significantly lower acidity because the grapes are too ripe, which will result in a less than satisfying balance in the final wine, since acidity is the main characteristic of dry wines. At this point, additional acid is needed. Usually, the acid added by the winemaker is mainly the natural tartaric acid contained in the grapes themselves. The greatest effect of adding acid is to stabilize the wine.
Generally speaking, the addition of sugars and acids during fermentation is only necessary when the grapes have not reached the balance point of ripeness. Grape ripeness determines the sugar content of the grapes. Too little or too much sugar is not good, so manual intervention is necessary. So should you add sugar to your wine? The decision depends on the sweetness of the grapes
These manually dried wines are certainly not the best wines, but to be honest, the average wine lover will not be able to taste them because there is really not much difference, and we cannot say that sweet and sour wines are necessarily very flawed.
If we have to distinguish between sweet and sour wines by taste, there is another way.
Let’s start with a simple one. There are clear and effective ways to distinguish between sour wines, because although this wine has added acid to keep it balanced, it usually tastes unbalanced. In your mouth, you will feel the tingling sensation of drinking a carbonated beverage, and the aftertaste of this wine has a taste similar to that of hard fructose.
Compared to sour wines, sweetened wines are difficult to distinguish because most of the added sugar is converted to alcohol, which makes them difficult to taste. Some people use lack of complexity and high acidity to determine whether a wine is sweetened, but they can only refer to it, which does not guarantee that all wines with lack of complexity and high acidity will be sweetened, because if so, many unaged wines made from many native Italian grape varieties will suffer from the error.
