"Dry" is the most misunderstood word on a wine label. People use it to mean "not fruity", "strong" or "puckering", but to a winemaker it means one thing: there is very little sugar left in the bottle. Once you know the numbers, you can read a label (or guess a wine) with much less luck involved.
Grape juice is sweet. During fermentation, yeast eats that sugar and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If the yeast eats nearly all of it, the wine is dry. If the winemaker stops fermentation early (by chilling the wine or filtering out the yeast), some sugar stays behind. That leftover is called residual sugar, measured in grams per litre (g/l).
Sparkling wine adds a second step. After the bubbles are made, a small top-up called the dosage (a little wine mixed with sugar) can be added just before the final cork. That is why sparkling wine has its own scale, with words like brut and demi-sec.
In the EU, the sweetness words are tied to sugar limits. Still wine and sparkling wine use different ladders. Try both below: type a sugar level, switch between still and sparkling, and see which word you are allowed to print.
The still-wine rule has a twist that surprises people. A wine can be called dry up to 4 g/l of sugar, or up to 9 g/l if its acidity is high enough: total acidity (in g/l as tartaric acid) must be no more than 2 g/l below the sugar. In the same way, medium dry runs up to 12 g/l, or up to 18 g/l if the acidity is no more than 10 g/l below the sugar. Move the acidity slider with sugar at 8 g/l and watch the word change. That is the law admitting what your tongue already knows: acid hides sugar.
Sweetness is not only about grams. Acidity pushes back against sugar in the mouth, much like lemon juice in lemonade. A German Riesling with 25 g/l of sugar can taste crisp and almost dry, because its acidity is high. A soft, low-acid wine with only 5 g/l can taste rounder and sweeter. Ripe fruit flavours, a little oak and a higher alcohol level can all create a feeling of sweetness with no sugar behind it.
Dry is a number on the lab report. Sweet is what you feel on your tongue. They are related, but they are not the same thing.
The sparkling ladder starts lower and goes by finer steps. Brut nature (also sold as zero dosage) has under 3 g/l and no sugar added. Extra brut goes up to 6 g/l and brut up to 12 g/l; brut is by far the most common style. Extra dry sounds drier than brut but is actually a little sweeter, at 12 to 17 g/l. Dry then means 17 to 32 g/l, demi-sec 32 to 50 g/l and doux (sweet) more than 50 g/l.
The reason the bubbly scale tolerates so much more sugar is that cold, fizzy, very acidic wine hides it well. A brut at 10 g/l is not noticeably sweet; the same 10 g/l in a still wine would be easy to spot.
The numbers are easier to feel as sugar in a glass. A glass is about 150 ml, and a level teaspoon of sugar is about 4 g. A brut sparkling wine at 10 g/l puts around 1.5 g of sugar in the glass, well under half a teaspoon. A sweet dessert wine at 120 g/l puts around 18 g in a small pour, which is more than four teaspoons, so dessert wines are served in small glasses. A dry wine is not sugar-free; it just has very little, and wine of any style still contains alcohol, so enjoy it in moderation.
Four quick checks turn the label into a guess you can trust:
These words apply to wine. Alcohol-free wines are not covered by this ladder, so for those check the sugar figure in the nutrition information instead.