What’s all the fuss about Dosage?

What’s all the fuss about Dosage? One of the things I see and hear at champagne tastings, much to my bewilderment, is what seems to me to be an obsession amongst some wine writers, wine journalists and others in the trade, about the ‘dosage’ – the amount of sugar that has added to the wine to adjust the level of sweetness. ‘What’s the dosage’? is often the first question asked of the champagne maker even before the wine has been tasted and, in my view, the question is almost always irrelevant. The questioner is not looking for a broad category of sweetness such as Brut, but rather a precise number in terms of grams of sugar per litre of wine. Asking this question – before you’ve even tasted the wine - suggests to me that the questioner is just using ‘dosage’ as a buzz word to convey the impression of some expert knowledge about champagne, when, I feel, it does the opposite: a misunderstanding of the purpose of dosage. Many decades ago, there was a lot more low-quality champagne on the

by jiles@mymaninchampagne.com (Jiles Halling) · source ↗