Medium Dry White Wines

We get it: how can a liquid be dry? Who came up with these terms, anyway? We don’t know the answer to that one, sadly, but we can help out with the frequently asked question: “What is dry white wine?”

When it comes to wine, dry isn’t the opposite of wet; it’s actually the opposite of sweet.

The winemaking process involves fermenting the crushed grapes with yeast, which converts sugar into alcohol. A sweet wine will undergo a shorter fermentation, meaning that not all of the sugar is turned to alcohol, but if all of the sugar is converted by the yeast, the wine produced will be considered dry.

Examples of typically dry white wines are Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio and Pinot Gris, some Rieslings (although there are sweet Rieslings, too), and Chardonnay. The flavours in these wines might be fruity, but that doesn’t necessarily make them sweet, as their sugar content is still low (in the same way that you find fruit flavours in red wine, but the wine itself isn’t sweet).

We’ve categorised all of our dry white wines together here, so you don’t have to read each label to work out which ones will take your fancy.