German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

a new way to measure sweetness
There’s entirely too much yammering
in Germany about sweetness, dryness,
sugar; it’s a kind of fetish. For our part,
we’re making progress but we still haven’t
quite outgrown a preoccupation with
residual sugar as a measure of “correctness.”
I do feel we have reached the point
of knowing the difference between actual
sweetness and the sense of sweetness a
wine conveys. Many of us know a Mosel
Kabinett with 30 grams of residual sugar
and 9 grams of acidity tastes drier than a
IT STARTS FROM ZERO. Zero is the point of no discernable sweetness.
MINUS ONE indicates sugar is discernibly absent but the wine is in balance.
MINUS TWO is for lovers of austere wines.
ONE signifies barely discernable sweetness.
TWO signifies sweetness which is discernable but not obtrusive.
THREE signifies sweetness important of itself. Remember, I reject any wine of
grotesque or vulgar sugariness.
FOUR is bona-fide dessert wine.
Put “SOS” into your lexicon today!
new world Chard-oak-nay with 9 grams of
sugar, no acid, and 14% alcohol.
I don’t think the standard sugar-pyramid
of German wines is Serviceable any
more. Thus I started noting each wine I
planned to list according to an intuitive scale
I tried to apply consistently. I call it the
SENSE-OF-SWEETNESS scale—SOS for
short—and you’ll see it following every tasting
note. It should be a more reliable guide
to the actual taste of a wine than any word on
any label. Here’s how it goes:
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