Recently, during a deluge of Saturday shoppers, a harried customer solicited my assistance, asking, “Can you help me? I’m looking for six bottles of sweet-dry red wine.”

One of the grand riddles encoded in wine terminology is the discernment of what someone really means when describing a wine as sweet or dry. This difficulty stems from a common confusion over the vocabulary of taste—technically a wine cannot be both sweet and dry. Thus, I am left with a conundrum: Do I recommend sweet or dry? Does she prefer sugar-sweet wines similar to Bully Hill’s Sweet Walter, sangria and Concord, or is she referring to the kind of natural sweetness that one finds in warm climate reds?

Sweet, dry, semi-sweet and semi-dry represent immensely confusing categories of wine styles. Unfortunately for the novice, finding a wine that will not taste too sweet or too dry can be overwhelming. While taste varies from person to person, even more so does the ability to describe an experience.

The most misunderstood of tasting terms, “dry” frequently conjures up something negative for the wine newbie. Dry, it is thought, means the wine tastes bitter. So pervasive is this association that I hesitate to use the term. Because dry wines sometimes taste fruity, consumers often refer to this fruitiness as “sweet.” Naturally enough, when eating a beautifully ripe peach, we say, “Ah, this peach is so sweet.” But in the vernacular of the wine world, once grape juice has its natural sugars converted to alcohol via fermentation, then it can no longer be described as sweet.

Sugar + Yeast = Alcohol + CO2

Fermentation, the process of turning grape juice into wine, converts the natural sugars of the grape into alcohol. When most of these sugars have been exhausted the wine is said to be “fermented dry.” A sweet wine has not been fermented dry and actually contains high percentages of residual sugars. Late harvest or ice wines are excellent examples of a sweet wine style. In this technical sense, dry and sweet refer to the style of the wine, not the impression of taste. Wine professionals learn to classify wines according to these technical perimeters. (For me to call red Bordeaux “sweet” would evoke the visceral reaction of nails being drawn across a blackboard.)

The trouble lies with the many in-between wine styles. For instance, some German Rieslings that possess high residual sugar may taste almost dry because their racy acidity balances out the sweetness. California Zinfandel, a dry wine (red), so often tastes surprisingly sweet that I sometimes recommend it as a wine to serve with chocolate cake.

Complicating matters even further are the widely varying levels of residual sugar found in so-called dry wine. Some brands deliberately sweeten their wines to increase mass appeal. The added sweetness softens the acidity and tannins in wine, imparting a fruity, Welch’s grape juice flavor. The ubiquitous Yellow Tail Shiraz, seductively soft, contains over eight grams of residual sugar in each .750ml bottle, while another Aussie Shiraz, 2-UP, contains zero. The customer who purchases both these brands is bound to be confused by Shiraz.

In Canada, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) employs a system which assigns a number to each wine according to its actual sugar content. Unfortunately, in the United States, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the government agency that controls and writes the regulations regarding labeling, sponsors no such consumer-friendly information on wine sold here.

Meanwhile, back at the shop…

My customer shifts her feet restlessly, as I launch into a dissertation on the faulty nature of our sensory abilities. Taste is an imperfect measurement, I explain, dependent upon a long list of variables. For instance, some tasters, well endowed with an abundance of tastebuds, are more sensitive to the finer nuances of wine than others. Acidity, tannins and age effect the impression of taste; young wines that initially taste tart will soften with a few years of ageing. Even atmosphere may skew one’s taste—tourists returning from Europe always lament that the wine tasted better over there. (Doesn’t everything taste better when you’re reclining on a veranda overlooking the vineyards of Tuscany?)

Skirting the looming danger of snobbish wine blather, I decide to take action. On a hunch, I suggest two fruit-forward reds from California, the Foppiano Red Lot 96, a Zinfandel blend, and Shenandoah Zinfandel. For variety, we wheel over to Spain, where I select Tres Ojos and Razon Rouge made from old vine Garnacha grapes. While all four wines are technically dry, they are imbued with voluptuous fruit; reds with low acidity and low tannin are immensely enjoyable early in life, but do not expect them to age gracefully; they are best drunk young.

For the last two bottles, I begin to describe two semi-sweet reds: a kosher wine from California, the 2005 Baron Herzog Jeunesse; and from Italy, the extremely popular 2007 Terre Cevico Dolce (previously known as Camauro), “comparable in sweetness only to a Lambrusco.” This Lambrusco analogy provides a successful reference point for my customer. “Riunite was my favorite wine in college—I think I’d like something a bit less sweet,” she says.

Aha! Finally, I may make sense of this seemingly contradictory request for a “sweet-dry” wine. We forego the semi-sweet wines in favor of the “fruity-dry” category, completing her six-bottle order (all $10 and under per bottle) with two of my favorite Australian reds—Henry’s Drive Pillar Box Red and Milton Park Shiraz.

Finding the right wine

Of course, developing your tastebuds and your vocabulary for taste is a pragmatic affair achieved only through hard work and diligent studies. Just kidding. To be fair, because of our lifelong association with eating and cooking, most everyone has developed a vocabulary for food. Would you ask the waiter to describe the smoky effects of the grill marks on the back of your salmon? No, with food talk a list of ingredients and procedures usually suffices. Not so with toothsome wine for which the fledging oenophile has no words.

I recommend tasting a wide variety of wines, paying particular attention to the ones you find delicious versus those that are just palatable. I also suggest saving the receipts for your wine purchases (under a magnet on your refrigerator is a convenient place). Star the ones that make a positive impression and share this information with your wine merchant. Over time they will come to understand your tastes, budget and willingness to experiment. Whatever you’ve enjoyed in the past is key to finding great wines that will please your unique palate.