That's what I always thought it meant, actually feeling dry after sipping. The sensation is lessened the sweeter the drink is though, which kinda makes sense too.

TIL astringency, and a buncha the fruits that are in this category. Gotta try cashew apple now.

i assume you're too sober to get it right, then. dry drinks are not always bitter. plenty of dry wines aren't bitter, they just aren't sweet. the opposite of bitter is usually "smooth," a term you have absolutely heard and accepted in that context.

You can usually tell immediately with one small taste. So 10mL maybe?

I find with wine it's easy as long as you have a sweet wine and a dry wine to taste back to back. Something like a Cabernet Sauvignon has a lot of tannins making it dry. When you take a drink, you can run your tongue along your teeth and it almost feels hydrophobic. Compare that to a Port wine that's like drinking hard grape juice. Then there are levels of dryness. Something like a Merlot is considered dry, but to me it's closer to sweet than dry.

I probably only have a couple glasses of wine a year anymore, but there was a time when I was playing sand volleyball across from a wine store, and me and a teammate would go about an hour before, share a bottle, then play ball. I tried a lot of different wines and went to a couple wine tasting events. It really made me appreciate the differences between the different kinds and to some extent price points.

I take savory as opposite of sweet, bitter is like a different axis

It’s funny because I’ve got an interest in booze but I’m also really into coffee and they’re slightly different.

With coffee, it doesn’t have any natural sweetness really, at least not like with wine. Generally describing a coffee as sweet means a nice balance of bitterness and acidity such that neither is overpowering. Sweet, more in the way of being pleasant, rather than sugary. And usually bitter and sour are the polar opposites. Whereas with booze, I think you’re right in that most people see sweet and bitter as opposites.

With that being said, dry is always the opposite of sweet with regards to professional tasting, at least for coffee and wine. I’m not sure about beer and spirits.

There are certainly flavour diagrams for specific types of alcohol. Scottish whisky, for example, either gets represented as a wheel of different non-competing flavours or with two axes of smoky - delicate and rich - light

Sweet is the opposite of a lot of things through, salty, sour, bitter…

That is an overstatement for sure, a dry wine might be 20% at most, but yes, either more sugar has fermented to alcohol or there just wasn't so much to begin with.

If white wines could be categorized like on a scale from sweetened fizzy grape juice to juicy lemonade to LaCroix, I like the ones on the LaCroix side. Not dry like sour but dry like spare, elegant. Less concentrated everything. Some Sauvignon Blanc is like that.

Red I like complex but absolutely not sweet and not necessarily strong. Not savory either. Langhe Nebbiolo or Valpolicella have been pretty reliable for me.

I don't think it's directly related to ABV/proof, but it can definitely taste that way. "Drier" drinks tend to not mask the alcohol as much, IMO. For example, the main difference between sweet and dry vermouth is how much sugar is in them, but they tend to be basically the same ABV.