A Good Question: The Word "Dry"

The question came up at a tasting a few nights ago: If my mouth feels dry when I drink a wine with tannin, is that what a “dry wine” means?

The answer is no. The word is valid to describe the dry, cottony feeling caused by red wine tannins on your cheeks and gums, but a dry wine is something different. It is a wine in which almost all of the natural grape sugars at harvest have been consumed by yeast during fermentation (and converted to alcohol)--that is, it's a wine with very little sugar. The level of sugar left in a wine that can be considered dry is determined by law in each wine region. Over that level, the wine is considered “off-dry” or a number of other terms describing the sugar level on an ascending scale to "sweet." So, if you ask for a wine that is “not too dry,” you risk being poured a slightly sweet wine. If you like a wine with low tannin, you’ll need to ask for exactly that.