3 Things You Thought You Knew About Wine

Written by: Calvin Webster, a wine writer, consultant, educator and Master of Wine student based in Nashville, TN. When he isn’t wine-ing, he loves cooking complicated dinners and strolling the sidewalks of Germantown with his wife and three kids.

1. The sulfites in wine give me headaches.

Way back when, the USDA published a table that showed that the average red wine
had less sugar than the average white wine. Case closed, right? Nope. There are far
more of what we call “off-dry” styles of white wine than red wine, so when you lump
them all together, the average sugar level of the white wines goes up. But here’s the
thing: who cares about the average?

The truth is that if you pick up a white wine made in a dry style (say, a bottle of
Sancerre) and a red wine made in a dry style (like Kirkland Côtes-du-Rhône, the best-
selling red import wine in the US), their sugar levels are extremely similar, and
extremely low. The Sancerre will be under 1 gram of sugar per liter. PER LITER,
PEOPLE. The Côtes-du-Rhône is significantly higher by percentage, but still quite low
(around 2g/L).

Where things get interesting is with popular domestic red wines. I’d rather not get any
cease-and-desist letters (wine giants can be litigious), but if your preferred red wine
brand sports the same letter as the heroine in a Nathaniel Hawthorne classic, you’re
looking at 17g/L residual sugar. That’s roughly twenty times the sugar in a bottle of
Sancerre! The sugar doesn’t stop at entry-level price points, either. Arguably the most
recognizable Napa Cab in the US? 9-10g/L – twelve times the sugar in that Sancerre
bottle.

What if you want to ditch the sugar?

• Avoid large domestic brands: If it says “California” on it and shows up on every
  grocery store shelf, skip it.
• Shop small: Start a relationship with a small local wine retailer. They can reliably
  point you towards styles and producers who make delicious, dry wines. And skip
  the big-box retailer private labels in favor of small producers who bottle under
  their own names.

2. The sulfites in wine give me headaches.

Maybe you really are the one person in a hundred that suffers from sulfite sensitivity.
But you probably aren’t. Besides, sulfites occur naturally in wine – alcoholic
fermentation produces sulfur dioxide as a byproduct. Winemakers add more sulfur
dioxide for a very simple reason: to make the wine more shelf stable.

The bottom line? If you eat dried fruit, jams, nut butters, or granulated sugar without
issue (yes, all those foods are commonly processed with SO 2 ), the concentrations found
in dry wine probably aren’t a problem for you. What is causing that headache? Probably
alcohol. Don’t binge drink, and mix in some water (between the glasses – you’re not an
animal). Sugar is another villain, which as you just learned, isn’t as low as you think if
you’re drinking certain red wines. Sleep degradation causes many a next-day headache
as well, so earlier drinking with a pause between consumption and bedtime is best. I
love a nightcap as much as the next guy – don’t shoot the messenger.

If you really want to avoid sulfites in wine, what should you do?

• Drink dry: Less sugar means less SO 2 , simple as that.
• Drink lower intervention, emphasis on the “er”: Don’t achieve 10 parts-per-
  million less SO 2 by drinking a wine that tastes of yesterday’s roadkill. You could
  be hit by a bus tomorrow.
• Drink acidic, tannic styles: All things being equal, wines with lower pH and
  higher levels of tannins need less SO 2 . Nebbiolo lovers of the world rejoice!

2. Always pick the second least expensive wine on the restaurant list.

Rather than dismiss this one out of hand, I evaluated twenty wine lists from Nashville
restaurants to see if it held any water. A few notes:

• Taste is subjective, but quality isn’t: This is about the quality of that second-
  least-expensive bottle, not whether it happens to be in a style you like to drink. If
  you’re picky about style, this rule of thumb isn’t much good to you anyway.
• Wine lists come in all shapes and sizes: To be truly useful, the rule of thumb
  must work at a local bistro just as well as on a fine-dining wine phone book.
  The results? I’m afraid I have bad news: this is an adage to unlearn. The second-least-
  expensive wine was an overperformer exactly 50% of the time. Five restaurants scored
  well on both red and white wine, five restaurants scored miserably on both, and the
  other ten had either a second-least-expensive white or red that passed muster, but not
  both.

If you want to do better than 50%, here’s a dummy-proof process that will bring your
success rate well over 80%:

1. Keep a short list of your recent favorite bottles. They should be reasonably
   well-distributed (the sommelier hasn’t tasted that Cabernet Gernischt your
   brother-in-law brought back from China), but not grocery-level staples. Bonus
   points if you can say why you liked the wine – e.g. “it was light and crisp”, “if was
   rich and unctuous”, or “it was cheap and contained alcohol”.
2. Talk to the sommelier or bartender. Tell them a wine or two that you really
   liked, and why you liked them, then ask for a recommendation in the same style.
   They know their lists, and they are infinitely more likely to find the best wine for
   you than whatever divining rod and crystal method you were planning on using to
   choose.