Admit it. You’ve been there at one point or another. Even if you know all about wine, at some point you saw the words “dry red wine” and thought, “what the heck is a dry red wine?”.
I was there. In college I would see this on recipes and would usually just pick another recipe.
I mean…c’mon. First off, I didn’t know what a dry red wine was. Varietal names swirled in my mind and I knew some were considered “dry”, but not which. Even if I did know though, how could you tell me that something as vague as a “dry wine” is appropriate for a recipe?
They didn’t tell me to “add 2 tbsp of spice”. They told me which spice.
Why don’t they do this with wine?
The intent of this blog post is to clarify what dry wines are and hopefully show you how rediculous it is to call for something as vague as a dry wine in a recipe.
So lay it on me. What’s a dry wine?
Wine is made from grape juice – we all know this much. Basically (mind you, this is a big simplification), winemakers smash up some grapes of a certain type and ferment the juice with wine yeast.
But yeast doesn’t ferment juice. Rather, it ferments sugar. And here in lies the key to the term “dry”. Dry simply means that most of the sugars in the juice have been fermented out and turned into alcohol. As such, usually “dry” wines are less sweet or sugary.
That’s it. Off-dry wines have a bit more sweetness to them. And sweet or fortified wines have even more residual sugar.
There are all sorts of ways to control the sugar content in wine-making land, all of which are beyond the scope of this post (and do you really want to know about them anyway?).
“Dry wine” simply means wine without much sweetness. You’ll notice that this doesn’t say anything about flavor. All wines have different flavors. And when you cook with these wines, the inherent flavors are going to amplify as you burn off the alcohol and water and concentrate them in the cooking process.
So why don’t recipes go a bit more into depth and tell you which wine to use? Well, even if they did tell you a varietal, that may not actually help much. A Chardonnay can taste very different depending on the wine-maker’s take on Chardonnays. They can be tart and acidic. Or round and buttery. Or very oaky. Who knows how this or that winery’s wine will taste.
A quick note about ACADÉMIE wines
We’ve developed our wines’ profiles with chefs to ensure that you’re always cooking with the wine that will make your food taste best. Best of all, the wines taste great. You can drink them while you cook (if you so choose). After all, we know you should never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. And we help you take the next step – making sure that this good tasting wine will actually help your recipe taste the best it possibly can.
