Michigan wines are sweet. That perception has been earned over a long period of time, but today, that’s all it is: a perception. The reality is that today’s Michigan wines offer a diverse range of styles to suit any palate. It’s true that we don’t completely take after our Californian and European colleagues when it comes to making wine, but we aren’t all soda pop wines either.
And hey, I understand this perception; it is based in reality, although it’s a reality from years ago. Michigan made mostly sweet wines, because most people who bought Michigan wines bought the sweet wines. It’s a classic market-driven equation. If you make both sweet and dry wine, and the sweet wine sells but the dry wine doesn’t, you stop making dry wine and make more sweet wine. You’re not stupid, and you’ve got bills to pay. Seems simple enough. But there is another reason why Michigan made sweet wines. It has to do with our climate and finding a balance in the wine.
Ok, I’m going to step away from that for a second and explain a few things (define a few terms) that are important when we talk about sweet wine. The first is a basic understanding of the fermentation process. Grapes are harvested in the fall, when the fruit is ripe. Just like any other fruit, when grapes ripen they get sweeter. That sweetness is a result of sugar (a few different types, but we won’t go into that here). It is that sugar that is “eaten” by the yeast during fermentation that gets converted to alcohol (and some heat and CO2). So as alcohol goes up, sugar goes down. The winemaker can stop fermentation at any point during the process. If all the sugar gets converted to alcohol, you end up with a “dry” wine (ok, there is always a tiny bit of sugar left, but it’s not noticeable, and again, we won’t get into that here). But if you stop fermentation along the way, there is some residual sugar left in the juice, and this makes a wine sweeter.
Now you can claim you only like dry wines or sweet wines, which are defined by the amount of residual sugar left, but it’s not telling you the real story. The perception of sweetness changes based on the acidity, tannins, alcohol, and often the fruitiness of the wine. Then you have actual acidity. Now we’re getting back to why Michigan often makes sweet wines. Good wines find a balance between sugar, acidity, and alcohol. When a wine is balanced, you don’t notice any one of these factors. Acids rise in grapes as they develop on the vine and as the grapes ripen, the acid is metabolized and sugar levels go up. Warmth helps with the metabolism. Our cool climate here in Michigan brings about some high acid levels in our grapes, and not as much of that acid is metabolized as it would be somewhere warm (say, California). So in order to find that balance, we leave a bit more sugar in our wine. It might not always taste sweet, but it diminishes any tartness that would be there if some of that sugar wasn’t retained.
So, sure Michigan makes some sweet wines, but that doesn’t define us. Or at least it doesn’t have to.
