To begin this fine year of 2026, we’re putting Florian Lauer – one of the boldest and most absolutely unrelenting explorers of the concept of “off dry” – in the spotlight for our annual celebration of “off-dry January.” Here he is, pictured, looking only slightly aggro.
He’s our folk hero for the month. Who knows, maybe we’ll make some Lauer merch.
We’ve planned a few events to mark this storied month. The fashionable go dry; we go off-dry.
We’ll have more information on all of these events soon, but mark your calendars now and RSVP to orders@vomboden.com:
> Week of January 19th: Lauer IG Live “Performances” (more details via IG)
> Tuesday, January 27th: Lauer: The Immersive Experience (industry-only)
> Wednesday, January 28th: A Lauer Zoom Masterclass
> Thursday, January 29th: Lauer-Fest BYOB Celebration at Noreetuh, NYC
(Tickets will go on sale soon, stay tuned…)
How should we think about off-dry wines here in the early winter of 2026?
A friend of mine made the following observation years ago: “If the Germans wanted to sell more wine, they should just make all their wine dry, period.”
A simpler truth is hard to find.
Yet, the corollary to this idea is noteworthy, even moving, especially in this era of unquestioning market acquiescence: The fact that numerous German wine regions still celebrate off-dry wines means they are fighting for their identity, their cultural heritage, despite the financial hardship this necessitates.
It is, to my mind, a glorious stand.
It is a righteous middle-finger to the polished, algorithm-based trends that seem to wash over our world like a tsunami. We are all caught in this wave: One minute it’s Merlot, then Cabernet Sauvignon, then Sancerre. Now it’s chilled reds? One minute the numbers six and seven have no particular meaning. Only days later kids from Arizona to Beijing laugh at their clueless parents struggling with a cryptic inside joke that has no meaning.
For worse, or maybe better, off-dry wine seems to exist in a fashion-less nowhere.
The very concept of sugar in a wine feels somehow anachronistic, anathema. The natural wine movement has had a part in painting sugar as a villain, though I don’t think this influence is really at the heart of the matter. Nonetheless, if wine is to be a symbol of purity, of simplicity, it should be neither filtered nor sulfured, or so the natural wine gurus suggest. A wine with residual sugar can incur both of these natural-wine boogeymen.
Yet, more than this, the contemporary aversion to sugar in wine feels both deeply rooted in our moment of obscene excess and acutely surface-oriented, a mere whim of fashion.
In one way, wine must not have sugar despite (or because of?) the fact that everything, everything, everything else is loaded up with sugar. We need sugar, somehow, in our bread, in our cereals and granola and yogurt, in our ketchup, BBQ sauce, soft drinks, in our salad dressings, in our marinades, coffees, energy drinks, and protein shakes.
But the natural sugars from the grape? No, these cannot in any circumstance remain in our wine. It is vinicultural blasphemy. (Another bizarre paradox of the current situation in wine: We cannot have any residual sugar in wine, yet we also don’t want this sugar converted to alcohol – low-alcohol is always better? There’s a whole separate treatise to be written on off-dry wine as the only “natural” low-alcohol wine.)
Yet, at the most banal level, a shallower and more obvious truth exists: There is nothing, nothing, less cool than an off-dry wine. The average wine drinker asks for an orange wine, for something unfiltered, for “natural wine,” long before they dare to ask for an off-dry wine.
For one to be of this moment, in-the-know, to be edgy, cool, sophisticated, one must drink only dry wines. Dry wine is the moment: The rebel and the conformist, the pretentious and the unaffected, they all gather around dry wines.
Which leaves what, or who? The drinker of off-dry wines is alone, ignored almost completely by the algorithm.
This is, in and of itself, perhaps the main reason I’d argue it’s time to revisit, or to dig deeper, into this most curious, misunderstood, ignored, blacklisted and ridiculed sub-genre of wine.
Want to explore off-dry Rieslings? We have the ultimate three-pack, ready to go: email orders@vomboden.com