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After fermentation has ended in the process of wine making, the residual sugar (or RS) is the measure of the amount of sugars that remain unfermented in the resulting wine.
Residual sugar is usually measured in grams of sugar per liter of wine. Even among the dryest wines it is rare to find wines with a level of less than 1 g/l. By contrast, any wine with over 45 g/l would be considered sweet, though many of the great sweet wines have levels much higher than this. For example, the great vintages of Château d'Yquem contain between 100 and 150 g/l of residual sugar. The sweetest form of the Hungarian Tokaji wine - Eszencia - contains over 450 g/l, with exceptional vintages registering 900g/l. Such wines only avoid the cloying taste associated with such elevated levels of sugar by carefully developed use of acidity. This means that the finest sweet wines are made with grape varieties that keep their acidity even at very high ripeness levels, such as Riesling and Chenin Blanc.
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