Salut/Hi Raymond,

le/on Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:58:29 +0800, tu disais/you said:-


>every 100, only 2 or 3 people like the sweet style. I am sure you prefer the
>dry style as well...right?

Wrong.

I love good sweet wines.

Mind you, I love good dry ones too.


--
All the Best
Ian Hoare
http://www.souvigne.com
mailbox full to avoid spam. try me at website

Salut/Hi Thomas Vehus,

le/on Sun, 23 Jan 2005 14:47:20 +0100, tu disais/you said:-

>Dry whites matches with more foods than off-dry and sweet wines. Is that not
>correct?

I'm truly not sure. I've had an entire menu of 10 courses, from scallops in
a cardamom flavoured jelly to a sumptuous desserts, including foie gras and
blue cheese, all accompanied by sweet wines. OK, it was done to prove a
point, but if you restrict dry wines to the (sort of legal) definition of
<5gm sugar per litre) then in the whole range of very slightly off dry to
hugely sweet whites, the range of matches is far wider than you might
suspect. A slightly off dry white will go well with many spicy dishes, even
made with beef for example.

I also think it partly depends upon your criteria for a successful match. If
you want both wine and food to be positively _enhanced_ by the enjoyment of
the other, I'd say that matches of this quality are pretty rare. If you are
prepared to accept a match where neither are diminished, then you can match
far more widely than most would imagine.

YMMV of course.

--
All the Best
Ian Hoare
http://www.souvigne.com
mailbox full to avoid spam. try me at website

Hi guys

Just one question:

1) How it is that DRY wines taste better than SWEET ones? It seems the whole
world is for the DRY style except some oddballs like me. I offered a friend
some German riesling without showing him the label. Without hesitation, he
said that it shouldn't be a good bottle. I asked why and he said "nobody
drinks sweet wines and good wines are always dry". I agree to the first part
of his reason. Almost 98% of the whites sold in our shops are DRY but the
bottle he sampled was an $85 dollar off-dry Auslese by Robert Weil which is
considered not too bad a bottle. It is really the natural residual sugar
that puts people off or it's just FASHION that everyone must follow? I find
it hard to believe that so many people have the same taste buds. It like for
every 100, only 2 or 3 people like the sweet style. I am sure you prefer the
dry style as well...right?

Regards
Ray

I can offer no stats, but I believe a lot of unsophisticated wine
drinkers still like sweeter wines.

Then there are the sophisticates who realise this and despise sweet
wines, which probably leads to people expressing preferences for dry
wines, even if they really like sweet ones.

I might be wrong here but I suspect there is residual suger in a lot
of cheap wines that do not advertise this fact. It appeals to the
masses and disguises poor wine. Such wines woudl appeal to both of
the above groups.

Me? I like both, for different occasions, but tend to drink more dry
wines.

--
Steve Slatcher
http://pobox.com/~steve.slatcher

"Raymond" > wrote:

> It like for every 100, only 2 or 3 people like the sweet style.
> I am sure you prefer the dry style as well...right?

You'll have to differenciate. While 99 percent of the wines I
drink are dry, that doesn't mean that I cannot accept or judge the
quality of a sweet wine. Dryness or sweetness is not a sign of
quality per se (as your friend apparently believes), it's just a
style. There are good and bad dry wines as there are good and bad
sweet wines.

Thus said, I'd walk miles for a Robert Weil Auslese!

M.

I think Steve is on right track. What happens is mostly this:
Many people (in New World at least) get their first impressions of wine
from sweet or semi-sweet cheap wines( white Zinfandel, for instance).
As they try more wines, they realize (and are told) that the more
expensive (dry) wines they try are better.
They associate the sweetness with the lack of quality. They convince
themselves that they don't like sweet wines, and immediately associate
any hint of sugar with cheapness.
In reality, while many cheap wines are sweet, sweetness itself is is no
indicator of quality. There are great dry wines, great off-dry wines
(top German Kabinetts), great sweet wines, great intensely sweet wines.
There are crappy wines produced at all levels of sweetness too.

Dry whites matches with more foods than off-dry and sweet wines. Is that not
correct?


"Raymond" > wrote in message
...
> Hi guys
>
> Just one question:
>
> 1) How it is that DRY wines taste better than SWEET ones? It seems the
> whole
> world is for the DRY style except some oddballs like me. I offered a
> friend
> some German riesling without showing him the label. Without hesitation, he
> said that it shouldn't be a good bottle. I asked why and he said "nobody
> drinks sweet wines and good wines are always dry". I agree to the first
> part
> of his reason. Almost 98% of the whites sold in our shops are DRY but the
> bottle he sampled was an $85 dollar off-dry Auslese by Robert Weil which
> is
> considered not too bad a bottle. It is really the natural residual sugar
> that puts people off or it's just FASHION that everyone must follow? I
> find
> it hard to believe that so many people have the same taste buds. It like
> for
> every 100, only 2 or 3 people like the sweet style. I am sure you prefer
> the
> dry style as well...right?
>
> Regards
> Ray
>
>

In article >,
Mike Tommasi > wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 14:47:20 +0100, "Thomas Vehus" >
> wrote:
>
> >Dry whites matches with more foods than off-dry and sweet wines. Is that not
> >correct?
>
> I think the origina post was referring to "cheap" sweet wines such as
> those that one used to find on the market.
>
>
> Sweet wines make everything more difficult, but the results can be
> stunning.
>
> First, you need to find some great sweet wines, and they tend to be
> expensive. Any sweet wine under $30 is probably made by "cheating",
> you want something from true late vintage or botrytis, with lots of
> acidity and plenty of terroir. Ice wines, even good ones, are perhaps
> the hardest to match, I don't bother. Botrytis adds the kind of
> complexity that one wants in order to open up the creative
> possibilities for food matches, and IMHO these are the best wines to
> play with.
>
> While these wines are perfect on their own, some of us have taken to
> the challenge of matching them to food. The matches tend to be very
> focused, they require a lot of experimenting, a lot of tuning, but
> once you get it right it can be breathtakingly successful; a slight
> change in the balance of spices can ruin everything though, so there
> is no easy recipe, you just have to experiment.
>
> There are no rules. Some guidelines might help. Avoid fat foods with
> sweet wine, they tend to make a nasty mix with sugar; foie gras can be
> married with sweet wines, but not as easily as the press might want
> you to think. Salty spicy foods can create peasant contrasts to the
> sweet acidity of great sweet wines. Oysters and Yquem are supposed to
> be wonderful, that is what Lur Saluces told me, and I can only believe
> him. I find Japanese cooking lends itself to experiments with sweet
> wine.
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France
> email link http://www.tommasi.org/mymail

Not sure I agree. I've never tasted anything better than w correctly
cooked fois gras coupled with a great Sauterne. Just had one last
Saturday that blew me away.

In ,

Raymond > typed:
> Hi guys
>
> Just one question:
>
> 1) How it is that DRY wines taste better than SWEET ones?


They don't necessarily.


> for every 100, only 2 or 3 people like the sweet style. I am
> sure you
> prefer the dry style as well...right?


Wrong. I like both. Which I drink at any given time depends on
what food I'm drinking it with. For my taste, dry wines go better
with most of what I eat, so I drink many more dry wines than
sweet ones. But that doesn't mean that I don't like sweet wines.

I think there are are three reasons for the perception that sweet
wines are inferior to dry ones:

1. The foods that most people drink wine with are usually better
with dry wines than whites.

2. I'm not sure what's available where you live (SG is Singapore,
right?) but here in the US, much of the sweet wine that's
available falls into two groups: the very cheap high-alcohol
stuff made to be sold to the wino who drinks this stuff from a
hip flask, and considerably more expensive stuff like vintage
port, trockenbeernauslese, and fine sauternes. Not to say there's
nothing in-between, but that there's comparatively little of it.

So the public's perception of sweet wine is based on what it
knows. It doesn't often know the expensive dry wines, because of
their price, and the cheap wines it has tasted are justly ignored
for being very poor.

3. Dry wine is marketed to the yuppies who are willing to pay
high prices for it. They are told that it's suave and
sophisticated to drink it. Night-train Express, Ripple, etc. is
marketed to the wino, who is told that he will get a big kick out
of it. Most people who can afford to choose prefer the former
image to the latter.

--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup

Hi Ray
I think part of the problem with sweet wines (which I love if it's the
right wine at the right time) is the overpowering nature of
concentrated sugars. In a balanced degustation meal of 10 courses &
wines to match, it would be unusual to have more than 2 sweet courses
as it would be unusual to have more than 2 sweet wines. We tend to eat
dessert at the end of a meal as the sugar can blunt our appetite &
palate, to this end then we would drink 5 to 1 dry wines to sweet. Not
an unusual ratio I would think. So dry wines do get drunk a lot more
often and not just because of fashion (though there are a great many
wine tragics of course) Cheers Andrew

It's very simple: Dry wines are for drinking with food. Sweet wines are
dessert wines.

Steve Slatcher wrote:

> I might be wrong here but I suspect there is residual suger in a lot
> of cheap wines that do not advertise this fact. It appeals to the
> masses and disguises poor wine. Such wines woudl appeal to both of
> the above groups.

Bingo. I was just reading that Gallo's Red Bicyclette blend is made
sweeter for the U.S. and dryer for the European market. One could argue
that the European is a more sophisticated market overall, and while a
wine being slightly sweeter doesn't in itself make it worse, the more
sophisticated palate would be put off if they were buying what they
thought was a dry wine and instead got an off-dry, where the less
sophisticated palate accepts what is in the glass. There is a quote
from somewhere that Americans talk about wanting dry, but secretly
prefer sweet (off dry).
Which brings me to that vast middle ground between bone-dry and dessert
wines: off-dry wines at their various levels pair stunningly with
certain foods and are appreciated (when made well) to be amongst the
finest of wines
e.

Hi,

Without trying to sound negative, I have to note that the consumers of
Gallo's Red Bicyclette blend in Europe would hardly be representatives
of the sophisticate consumer, whether in the US or Europ.

Cheers

You said it Mike! One of my favourite foods with less acidic sweet
wines is the spicy Indian snack "Bhujia".

http://www.indiaplaza.com/catalog/ca...gifts&place=US
Cheers

wrote:

> There is a quote from somewhere that Americans talk about
> wanting dry, but secretly prefer sweet (off dry).

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was a sommelier in a top restaurant
here in Vienna, we frequently had American patrons that wanted
their wine "dry, but not too dry" (an oyxmoron, of course). I
regularly served them a 1981 Riesling Spätlese (Winzer Krems) with
solid 20 grams of RS. They invariably were totally delighted.

M.

My tastes are very skewed in favor of semi-sweet to very sweet wines, to
my palate what others call semi-sweet are quite dry. Although I have had
dry whites with food, most preperations work better with off dry German
reisling than with dry Chardonnay or others. I never drink dry wines on
their own and no dry wine has ever thrilled me.

> skrev i melding
oups.com...
> It's very simple: Dry wines are for drinking with food. Sweet wines are
> dessert wines.
>
Proving that dessert is not food.
Anders

This is my new favorite example! Thanks for that (and for those vintner
suggestions in the other thread, by the way)

And regarding the sophistication level of Red Bicyclette: I was just
trying to come up with an example most might have heard of. But let's
wait and see how much it sells. Bet it's a frighteningly large amount,
here and there.

e.

There are sweet wines which are among the finest wines in the world. There
are also dry wines which are among the finest wines in the world. Excepting
sweet wines as aperitifs or dessert wines, sweet wine with food is often a
matter of fashion. The Russian royal family, for many generations, drank
sweet wines almost exclusively, even with food. I think most will agree,
however, that the Czar's taste is not for everybody. However, certain
foods, such as veined cheeses and fois gras, are acknowledged to go well
with sweet wines. Fiery Hungarian cuisine also is complemented by sweet
wines of quality, as are many other spicy cuisines throughout the world. In
the end, though, poor quality sweet wines have given higher quality ones a
bad name among unsophisticated consumers. A pity, really. In any case, all
will agree that the proper dessert paired with a quality sweet wine can be a
most enjoyable finish to a meal.

Craig Winchell
GAN EDEN Wines

"Raymond" > wrote in message
...
> Hi guys
>
> Just one question:
>
> 1) How it is that DRY wines taste better than SWEET ones? It seems the
> whole
> world is for the DRY style except some oddballs like me. I offered a
> friend
> some German riesling without showing him the label. Without hesitation, he
> said that it shouldn't be a good bottle. I asked why and he said "nobody
> drinks sweet wines and good wines are always dry". I agree to the first
> part
> of his reason. Almost 98% of the whites sold in our shops are DRY but the
> bottle he sampled was an $85 dollar off-dry Auslese by Robert Weil which
> is
> considered not too bad a bottle. It is really the natural residual sugar
> that puts people off or it's just FASHION that everyone must follow? I
> find
> it hard to believe that so many people have the same taste buds. It like
> for
> every 100, only 2 or 3 people like the sweet style. I am sure you prefer
> the
> dry style as well...right?
>
> Regards
> Ray
>
>

"Craig Winchell/GAN EDEN Wines" > wrote:

> The Russian royal family, for many generations, drank sweet
> wines almost exclusively, even with food.

In the late 19th/early 20th century oysters & Yquem were an often
seen pairing, as one can see from royal menu cards all over Europe
from that time.

M.

In ,
Michael Pronay > typed:

> In the late 19th/early 20th century oysters & Yquem were an
> often
> seen pairing, as one can see from royal menu cards all over
> Europe
> from that time.


One of the strangest wine pairings of my life was scrambled eggs
and Yquem. I had it very early in my wine-drinking days, simply
because I didn't know any better. I walked into a wine shop,
asked for a good wine, and walked out with a bottle of Yquem.


--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup