Berger: Dry-wine snobs missing out

Bone-dry wine is the wine lover’s mantra, or so it seems.

Part of this comes from the long history of European wines being sold in the United States for many decades. Most were austere and tart.

Sweeter wines were considered to be for novices. Real wine lovers drank only dry wine, and the drier the better. Verification of this “dry is better” thesis came between the 1960s and 1980s when we saw the proliferation of all kinds of sweet wines, from sangria to Lambrusco, and including Blue Nun, Riunite, and White Zinfandel.

Wine snobs believed anyone caught drinking such sweet products was a novice. Snobs, by contrast, were happy with their austere, hard-to-swallow, bone-dry wines.

I found the anti-sweet crowd to be a bit overbearing, even to the point where they wouldn’t even try wines as sublime as great rieslings, chenin blancs (vouvray), and gewurztraminers.

No one who has ever consumed a great German Auslese (with the emphasis on great) would suggest that the wine would be better off if it were bone dry. Part of such wines’ greatness is their sweetness.

Last week we had a 2001 Fritz Haag Riesling Auslese from the Mosel with some excellent - and spicy - Himalayan food. The wine was simply awesome. The secret was its astounding interplay of acid and sugar that gave the wine a succulent entry and a dry finish.

It got me thinking about why sugar in wine is automatically dissed by snobs who’d rather wade through a thicket of tannin to be politically correct as they gurgle about the 97 points the wine got. Vinous correctness can lead people to do silly things with their own palates.

Two decades ago I dined at a great Santa Monica restaurant, Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois. Many dishes on the menu can be spicy, so the perfect wine is a gewurztraminer with a slight amount of sugar.

The best gewurztraminer in California, Navarro, at the time was slightly sweet - a perfect match for the food. And the restaurant had that wine. As we walked through the place, we noted that every table with a bottle of wine had a chardonnay, all of them oaky - a curious wine-food match.

Among wine lovers’ favorite whites in the last few years are pinot gris and sauvignon blanc. Because of high acid levels in some wines, residual sugar often is left in the wine to balance the taste. Even with classic New Zealand sauvignon blancs, a bit of residual sugar can be an appealing way to deal with high acid levels.

Yet some wine consumers still decry this, arguing that if a wine is ever to be considered great, it has to be bone dry - even if the bone-dry wine is virtually undrinkable.

I love bone-dry wines like muscadet, sancerre, white Graves, Portuguese vinho verde, Australian riesling and semillon, and German silvaner.

But I’m also in love with slightly sweeter wines in which the sugar is there not to make the wine sweet, but to add a texture and succulence that bone-dry wines rarely offer.

Wine of the Week: 2014 Girasole Pinot Blanc, Mendocino County ($14) – Pinot Blanc is at home in the Alsace of France. It’s a lesser-known grape with a passing resemblance to Chardonnay. Here the wine has a stylish aroma of fresh pears and peach. Though not actually sweet, the wine is soft and appealing and is terrific with mild Asian foods.

Sonoma County resident Dan Berger publishes “Vintage Experiences,” a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com.