🍷 Medium-sweet wine
Also known as: medium sweet wine
A noticeably sweet wine, though dessert wines can be sweeter still.
Medium-sweet wine is clearly sweet, but dessert wines are sweeter still. Under European Union rules it holds from 12 to 18 up to 45 grams of sugar per litre. The lower limit depends on acidity: the more acidic the wine, the more sugar it can hide.
Where does the sweetness come from? Sometimes fermentation is stopped early, and part of the grape sugar stays in the wine. Sometimes the grapes are picked late. In medium-sweet wines sweetness is balanced by acidity, so they do not feel cloying.
Other categories stand next to it. Medium-dry wine is drier, and sweet wine is sweeter. In France a similar wine is called moelleux, in Germany lieblich, in Italy amabile. All these words describe roughly the same thing: a soft, clearly sweet wine.
On an English-language label look for medium-sweet in the sugar line; on a German one the word is lieblich, on a French one moelleux, on an Italian one amabile. This is useful if you want to choose a wine by taste. As with any alcohol, it should be drunk in moderation.
How it connects to Wine
🍷 Medium-sweet wine → similar → 🍷 Sweet wine → kind of → 🍷 Types of wine → kind of → 🍷 Wine
Links
- Part of
- 🍯 Wine sweetness
- Similar and different
- 🍷 Medium-dry wine, 🍷 Sweet wine, 🍷 Lieblich, 🍷 Amabile, 🍷 Moelleux, 🏷️ Liebfraumilch, 🏷️ Hock
Frequently asked questions
How much sugar is in medium-sweet wine?
Under European Union rules, from 12 to 18 up to 45 grams per litre.
Is it true that medium-sweet wine is a dessert wine?
No. Medium-sweet is soft and clearly sweet, but not as thick as dessert wine; sweet wine has more sugar still.
Which foreign words mean medium-sweet on a bottle?
Lieblich on German labels, moelleux on French ones and amabile on Italian ones.
Comparisons
Guides
What to read next
- 🏷️ Liebfraumilch — German traditional term for a medium-sweet white PDO quality wine from the Nahe, Rheingau, Rheinhessen or Pfalz, at least 70 % Riesling, Silvaner, Müller-Thurgau or Kerner.
- 🏷️ Hock — German traditional term for a medium-sweet white wine with a protected geographical indication (PGI) from the Rhine wine-growing zone.
Similar
🍷 Residual sugar · 🍷 Dry wine · 🍷 Medium-dry wine · 🍷 Abboccato · 🍷 Dolce · 🍷 Süß
⚠️ Wine contains alcohol: adults only, drink in moderation. Wine usually contains sulphites; egg white or milk proteins are sometimes used for fining — important for allergies and for vegans.