How Dry is Dry?

Lot's of you have told me recently that you are often unsure how sweet or dry a bottle of champagne will be and so you don't know whether or not it will suit your taste.

In fact this is one of the things about champagne that you should be able to find out with complete accuracy, but... surprise, surprise... it's not always quite as simple as that.

When champagne comes out of the cellars at the end of the ageing process, it is absolutely bone dry; too dry in fact for most people’s liking.

So, in most cases,  a small amount of liquid sugar is added to adjust the final taste before the bottle is sold.

This process is called dosage in French. The dryness/sweetness of the champagne depends on the amount of sugar added and there are several possible categories of sweetness which are measured in terms of grams of sugar per litre ( gr/l)

The various categories are
Brut Zero (sometimes called brut sauvage, ultra brut)         No sugar added
Brut Nature                                                                                  < 3gr/l  
Extra Brut                                                                                 0 – 6 gr/l
Brut (by far the most common)                                                  6 -14 gr/l
Extra Dry                                                                                 12 – 20 gr/l
Sec                                                                                          17 – 35 gr/l
Demi-sec                                                                                  33 – 50 gr/l
Doux                                                                                            >50 gr/l

One of these categories must, by law,  be shown on the label so that gives you a clue as to the level of sweetness, but the problem is that some of the categories are quite broad. A champagne with 6gr/l of sugar is a brut, but so too is a champagne with 12 gr/l – twice as much – and you can’t tell this by looking at the label.

Also, you'll see that some categories overlap which seems to me just another source of potential confusion. 

In fact the champagne maker can tell you precisely how much sugar had been adding during the dosage and it wouldn't be difficult to put this on the label.

I don't believe that there's anything confidential about this either so all in all I can't see any reason why the consumer should not get chapter and verse on this important detail instead of the broad categories that currently appear on the label.

Like I said at the beginning, finding out the exact sweetness of a champagne should be easy but the only way to find out exactly how much sugar has been added (short of contacting the maker) is to ask your retailer and as I've said many times before - he/she should know.

Next time you're buying a bottle of champagne why not ask the retailer what the dosage is and see what they have to say?