Is There Sugar in Wine? The Truth — and Why Morgan’s Rieslings Tell the Whole Story
A recent survey from the Wine Market Council found that 47% of American consumers believe wine is high in sugar — and more than half of those people think that sugar is added during production, conjuring images of industrial sweeteners being poured into tanks before bottling. An additional 36% believe artificial sweeteners like Splenda or stevia are part of the process. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, both beliefs are false.
Here at Team Morgan, we understand where the confusion comes from. But we also believe wine drinkers deserve straight answers — not marketing spin. So let’s talk about sugar honestly, walk through how wine actually works, and let our two Double L Rieslings show you exactly what transparency looks like in the glass.
Why Sugar Became Wine’s Villain
We’re living through an intensely wellness-conscious moment in American culture, and sugar has become one of its primary villains. The same Wine Market Council survey found that consumers who said they were drinking less wine cited calories and sugar as their top two health concerns — ahead of alcohol itself, which is notable. Hard seltzers have capitalized brilliantly on this anxiety, plastering low-calorie and low-sugar claims across their branding while wine sits largely silent on the subject.
The irony is that the spirits industry has quietly been winning this conversation. Tequila brands have spent years promoting their products as sugar-free and low-calorie — and tequila sales have surged as a result. Vodka and gin share the same profile but haven’t marketed it with the same aggression. Meanwhile, wine — which for most of its styles is equally free of added sugar — has let the myth metastasize.
The belief that wine is loaded with sugar isn’t coming from nowhere, either. Entry-level wines like Moscato and white Zinfandel are genuinely sweet, and they’re frequently the first wines younger drinkers encounter. The Wine Market Council found that 54% of consumers aged 21–39 believe wine is high in sugar — compared to just 37% of baby boomers. First impressions stick, especially when no one takes the time to explain that those wines represent one end of a very wide spectrum.
Add to that the fact that U.S. law doesn’t require wineries to disclose sugar content, calorie counts, or ingredient lists on their labels. Consumers are left to guess — and when you can’t see the data, you fill in the blanks with whatever narrative feels most plausible. Right now, “wine has a lot of sugar” is the assumption filling them.
How Wine Actually Works
The winemaking process starts with grape juice, which is naturally full of sugar — fructose and glucose that the vine spent an entire growing season developing. During fermentation, yeast consumes those sugars and converts them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When fermentation runs to completion, virtually all of that natural sugar has been eaten up. The result is a dry wine with little to no residual sugar remaining.
Residual sugar — or RS — is simply whatever natural grape sugar is left after fermentation stops. In a bone-dry wine, that number rounds to zero. In wines where the winemaker has made a deliberate choice to stop fermentation before it finishes, some of that natural sugar is preserved, producing an off-dry or sweet style with lower alcohol as a result. That’s it!
One thing worth stating plainly: adding granulated sugar to table wine during winemaking (a practice called chaptalization) is illegal in the United States. What you occasionally do find in mass-market wines is grape concentrate, a syrupy additive that can boost sweetness and color. The best-known brand is called Mega Purple. Yes, that’s a real thing that some producers use. It is not something that belongs anywhere near our family-owned, organically-farmed winery with four decades of reputation on the line.
Dry doesn’t mean flavorless. A wine can taste intensely fruity, aromatic, even lush, and still have zero residual sugar. What you’re experiencing is the character of the grape and the place it came from, not sweetness.
Riesling: Wine’s Most Misunderstood Grape
If any varietal has taken an unfair hit from the sugar myth, it’s Riesling. The grape carries a decades-old reputation for sweetness that it simply doesn’t always deserve — and in many cases, actively contradicts.
Riesling is one of the most versatile white wine grapes in the world, capable of producing everything from searingly dry mineral wines to luscious late-harvest dessert bottles — sometimes from the same vineyard in the same vintage, depending on how the winemaker handles the fruit. That range is part of what makes it so interesting. It’s also part of what makes it so confusing to consumers who haven’t had someone walk them through the spectrum.
At our Double L Vineyard, we’re lucky to grow Riesling in a site that genuinely suits it. The Santa Lucia Highlands appellation sits in the foothills above the Salinas Valley. Cool Pacific air funnels through the valley daily, dropping afternoon temperatures dramatically and preserving the natural acidity in the grapes. Growing seasons are long and gradual, allowing flavors to develop fully while sugars stay in check. The well-drained, rocky hillside soils push the vines to work hard, concentrating flavor rather than diluting it with excess water. These are the conditions that produce Riesling with genuine tension and precision — wines that taste alive in the glass.
Double L is also the only certified organic vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands appellation, a designation we’ve earned through decades of commitment to farming without synthetic pesticides or herbicides. That philosophy of care extends naturally to how we talk about what’s in our wines.
Two Wines, Two Styles, One Honest Conversation
We make two Rieslings from the Double L Vineyard, and together they offer the clearest illustration we know of how sugar in wine actually works — and what the difference between dry and off-dry really means when you taste it side by side.
2023 Double L Dry Riesling
0% Residual Sugar
Our Double L Dry Riesling is exactly what it says on the label. The grapes were foot stomped. gently pressed, cold settled, and fermented in stainless steel tanks — and then fermentation was allowed to run all the way to completion. Zero residual sugar remains. Nothing was held back, added, or adjusted.
In the glass, it opens with a graceful nose of pear, Meyer lemon, and white peach — the kind of aromatics that immediately signal a cool-climate wine with something to say. Classic Riesling flavors of apple and pear flow through the wine’s opulent character, while bone-dry acidity keeps everything lifted, focused, and clean on the finish. It’s a wine that rewards attention without demanding it — equally at home at a dinner party or a quiet Tuesday night.
When it comes to food, the Dry Riesling’s bright acidity, low alcohol, and zero RS make it one of the most versatile whites on the table. It’s a natural partner for oysters and raw shellfish, where its mineral edge and citrus notes mirror the brine of the sea. It works beautifully with summer salads dressed in vinaigrette, grilled fish, and aged cheeses — anywhere you want a white wine that refreshes rather than overwhelms.
2024 Double L Riesling — Kabinett Style
~2–2.5% Residual Sugar
Our Double L Riesling takes a different path through the cellar — and understanding that path is the key to understanding why its residual sugar is a feature, not a flaw.
The grapes were foot-stomped and left to macerate overnight, a gentle technique that encourages fuller extraction of aromatic compounds before pressing. After gentle pressing and cold settling, cold fermentation preserved the fruit’s natural brightness and delicacy. Then, at the right moment, fermentation was deliberately arrested by chilling — locking in a small amount of natural residual sugar, preserving the wine’s low alcohol, and capturing a style that has been celebrated in Germany for centuries.
This is what winemakers call Kabinett style — named for the lightest, most delicate category in the German Prädikat classification system. Kabinett style wines are harvested at relatively low sugar levels, fermented partially, and finished with a touch of natural sweetness that serves as a counterweight to the grape’s high acidity. The result isn’t a sweet wine. It’s a wine in balance — one where sweetness and acidity hold each other in elegant tension. The ~2–2.5% RS in our Riesling is entirely natural, entirely intentional, and entirely different from the grape concentrate or added sweeteners that drive sweetness in mass-market bottles.
In the glass, the Double L Riesling opens with a graceful, appealing nose of baked apple and clementine. Stone fruit and kumquat flavors weave beautifully through the wine’s opulent aromatics, and while the palate begins with a hint of warmth and richness, it finishes bright and clean — a hallmark of great Kabinett-style Riesling. It’s a wine that surprises people who think they don’t like sweet wines, because it doesn’t drink like one.
At the table, this is where spice becomes an Off-Dry Riesling’s best friend. The wine’s natural residual sugar acts as a buffer against heat, making it an extraordinary match for spicy Thai curries, Sichuan noodles, and Indian dishes with complex chili heat. It’s equally at home with soft, pungent cheeses like Roquefort — where the wine’s sweetness and the cheese’s salt create one of the great contrasts in food and wine pairing — and with stone fruit desserts or anything involving a honey glaze.
Still not sure which style is yours? A simple rule: if you’re pairing with something savory, bright, or salty, reach for the Dry Riesling. If heat, spice, or richness is on the menu, the Off-Dry is your wine. Better yet, taste them side by side at Taste Morgan in Carmel. Our team loves walking guests through exactly this conversation.
What Organic Farming Has to Do With It
There’s a reason we’re comfortable having this conversation openly, and it goes beyond marketing. At Double L Vineyard, organic certification isn’t a label we put on our bottles to chase a trend — it’s the result of decades of deliberate choices about how we want to farm and what we want our wines to say about the land they come from. No synthetic inputs. No shortcuts. Nothing in the vineyard that we wouldn’t want showing up in the glass.
That same philosophy extends to the cellar. When your farming is honest, your winemaking can be honest too. You’re not compensating for thin fruit with added sweetness, or masking green tannins with clever chemistry. The wines reflect what the vineyard gave us in a given year — and that’s something worth talking about rather than hiding.
The sugar conversation happening in the broader wine industry right now is, at its core, a transparency conversation. Consumers want to know what’s in their glass. That’s not an unreasonable ask — and it’s one we’ve been answering through our farming and winemaking philosophy for four decades.
Raise a Glass to Knowing What’s in Your Wine
Most Morgan wines are dry. Where there is residual sugar — as in our Off-Dry Riesling — it’s natural, intentional, and part of a winemaking tradition that stretches back centuries across the wine regions of Germany. There is no Mega Purple in our cellar. No added sweeteners, no grape concentrate, no industrial shortcuts. What’s in the glass is what Double L Vineyard and four decades of winemaking craft produced.
If you’ve been steering clear of wine over sugar concerns, we’d gently invite you to take another look — and maybe start with two bottles that tell the whole story.
Explore both expressions of Double L Riesling — dry and off-dry — and taste the difference for yourself.
