How to tell sweet from dry

Of the 1,582 bottles in Nairobi’s shops, 804 are dry, 43 off-dry and 129 sweet, as far as we can tell. That leaves 606 we don’t know about. Here is how we sort them, which is also how you can tell in the shop.

1. Read the label

104 bottles say it on the label: Sweet Red (30), Sweet White (18), Sweet Rosé (15), Natural Sweet (20), Moscato (18) and Fragolino (10). We count all of them as sweet. Four Cousins Natural Sweet Red, KSh 1,000 at Chupa Chap, is one.

“Natural Sweet” only means the sweetness comes from the grapes. It has nothing to do with natural wine.

2. No word on the label? Look at Vivino

Vivino drinkers score a wine’s sweetness from 1 to 5. We call 3 and up sweet, 2.5 to 3 off-dry (a touch of sweetness), and under 2.5 dry. Some well-known bottles in the shops:

3. Bubbles: the words run backwards

Under EU rules a sparkling wine’s label has to say how much sugar is in it, and most bubbles use the same words. The scale is odd: “Extra Dry” is sweeter than Brut, and “Sec” (dry) is sweeter still. Here is the EU scale, with how many bottles in Nairobi’s shops use each word.

Source: EU Regulation 2019/33, Article 47 and Annex III. The actual sugar may differ from the label’s by up to 3 g a litre.

4. Still not sure? Ask

For 606 bottles there’s no sweet word on the label and no Vivino score, so we don’t know and don’t guess: they stay out of all three choices in the Sweetness filter. The shop may know, and many producers publish a tech sheet that gives the sugar in grams per litre.