Is Kabinett a sweet wine?

Short answer: not necessarily. Kabinett tells you something about the grapes, not about the sugar in the wine. A Kabinett can be fully dry, off-dry or sweet, and a different word on the label tells you which.

What Kabinett actually means

Kabinett is the first of six Prädikate in German wine law: Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese and Eiswein. The Prädikate rank the grapes by ripeness at harvest, from the earliest picked to the most concentrated.

Kabinett has one rule that sets it apart from ordinary quality wine: no sugar may be added before fermentation. All the alcohol comes from the grapes' own sugar, and Kabinett makes the lightest wines on the scale.

Further up, the requirements tighten. Spätlese must be made from fully ripe, late-harvested grapes. Auslese may include nobly rotten grapes. Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese must be picked by hand, and an Eiswein must be frozen both when it is picked and when it is pressed.

So how sweet is it?

Sweetness has its own term, regulated down to the gram. "Trocken" means at most 4 grams of residual sugar per litre, or up to 9 when the acidity is high enough. "Halbtrocken" goes up to 12, or 18 with the same acidity condition. If there is no sweetness term, the label says nothing about the sugar, and the analysis on the producer's fact sheet is the place to look.

The rule of thumb: read the Prädikat as the answer to "how ripe were the grapes?", and the sweetness term as the answer to "how much sugar is left?". The two questions have different answers.

Kabinett in our selection

Brauneberger Juffer Kabinett Trocken from Bauer is exactly this combination: grapes picked at Kabinett level in the Juffer vineyard, fermented dry. Light, with citrus, ripe apple and salty minerality. For the other end of the scale, Kammer Feinherb from Paulinshof is a Spätlese with more residual sweetness.

In short

Kabinett is about ripe grapes and no added sugar, not about sweetness. Look for trocken or halbtrocken next to it. The full label dictionary is in our guide to German wine labels, and the sweetness levels have their own article.