Is riesling sweet or dry?

Riesling as a grape is neither sweet nor dry; the winemaker decides that during fermentation.

Yeast converts the sugar from the grape juice into alcohol. If the winemaker lets that fermentation run all the way, almost all the sugar disappears and a dry wine ends up in the bottle. If he intervenes earlier, by chilling the wine, filtering it or stopping the fermentation in some other way, part of the sugar is left behind. The same grape variety thus yields a fully dry wine and a distinctly sweet wine, from the same vineyard and sometimes even from the same harvest year. The question whether riesling is sweet or dry is therefore not about the grape but about a choice in the cellar.

European legislation determines when a wine may be called dry, medium-dry, medium-sweet or sweet, and expresses those limits in grams of sugar per litre.

Article 52 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/33 refers to Annex III, part B for still wine. Dry may contain up to 4 grams of sugar per liter, and up to 9 grams as long as the total acidity is no more than 2 grams per liter below the residual sugar. Medium dry goes up to 12 grams, and up to 18 grams if the acidity is no more than 10 grams below the residual sugar. Medium sweet goes up to 45 grams per liter and sweet starts at 45 grams. Sparkling wine has its own scale in part A of the same annex, with different numbers: extra dry from 12 to 17 grams, dry from 17 to 32 grams, demi-sec from 32 to 50 grams and doux above 50 grams per liter.

Trocken means dry and halbtrocken means semi-dry, with the same grams as in the European rule, and feinherb is not a legal designation.

Feinherb came into use in Germany for wines that fall just outside halbtrocken or that feel rounder than that word promises. Because the term is not defined, the residual sugar in practice lies somewhere between 9 and 45 grams per litre, as the ProWein trade magazine describes. Winemakers on the Mosel began calling their off-dry riesling that when halbtrocken sold poorly. Lieblich stands for medium-sweet and the designation sweet for the category above it. That dry has by now become the largest group is shown by the inspection figures of the Deutsches Weininstitut: 53 percent of the German quality and Prädikat wine submitted in 2025 was dry, against 48 percent in 2020 and 40 percent in 2010. These figures cover all German quality wine together, not riesling separately.

Sugar left behind has not been converted into alcohol, so a sweet riesling has a low alcohol percentage and a dry riesling a higher one.

If the bottle says 7.5 or 8 percent, the fermentation was stopped early and sugar has remained in the wine. If it says 12 or 13 percent, the wine is almost certainly fully fermented and dry. That is exactly what our own selection shows: the riesling wine in the shop on the Brink in Bathmen ranges from 9 to 13.5 percent alcohol. The same grape variety, a difference of 4.5 percentage points, and that difference lies mainly in the choice of whether or not to finish the fermentation. The alcohol percentage is mandatory on every label, so you can do this check on any bottle, even if there is no taste indication on it.

A Prädikat concerns the must weight of the grapes at harvest, not directly the sweetness of the wine in the bottle.

The British register of protected wine designations describes the German Prädikate in degrees Oechsle: Kabinett 67 to 85, Spätlese 76 to 95, Auslese 85 to 100, Beerenauslese 110 to 125 and Trockenbeerenauslese above 150. Eiswein comes from grapes harvested in severe frost of less than seven degrees below zero and pressed frozen. A higher must weight gives the winemaker more sugar to work with, but he may still let that sugar ferment out completely. That is why dry Kabinett and dry Spätlese exist, and why trocken often appears next to the Prädikat on such bottles. From Beerenauslese upwards, the wine is in practice sweet, because that much sugar cannot be fermented out entirely.

Alsatian riesling is generally dry, and the winegrowers of Alsace voted by a two-thirds majority for a rule that makes this mandatory from the 2021 harvest.

The trade magazine Decanter described that decision and the condition attached to it: dry according to the European definition, so up to 4 grams of sugar per litre, or up to 9 grams with enough acidity. Late harvests fall outside that rule, because Vendanges Tardives and Sélection de Grains Nobles are intended precisely as sweet wine. For still wine from the appellation Alsace, a mandatory taste scale with sec, demi-sec, moelleux and doux has also applied since that same harvest, so that the taste direction is always on the label. If you buy an Alsace riesling without a mention of a late harvest, you can expect dry. We do not sell alcohol to persons under 18 years of age.