Wine can actually be rather complex, and when it comes to some alcoholic drinks, I think a lot of people assume all alcoholic drinks are bitter because of the ethanol.
You can actually find wines that are rather sweet, and this is when I explain what "wet" or "dry" means in terms of describing flavors of drinks.
Speaking as someone that brews frequently, alcoholic drinks are measured by Specific Gravity, essentially, the density of the liquid.
Water's around 1.000 specific gravity.
When you start the brewing process, the must (if it's wine) or wort (if it's beer) is actually really sugary. And that's for the reason that wine, beer, mead, and cider are made not through distilling, but through fermentation of yeast. Yeast eat sugar and give off ethanol as a waste product.
So if we're making a wine around 11% alcohol by volume, let's say, we'd want to start with a must with a specific gravity of 1.085, which you can measure with a hydrometer. As you add the yeast, they'll consume the sugars from the grape juice we've made, and the longer you let them go, the closer they bring the density of the liquid to water.
Once it reaches around 1.000, the specific gravity of water, we'll have around 11% alcohol by volume due to yeast fermentation.
I point this out, because you can use the specific gravity of the wine at this point to roughly gauge how sweet or dry the wine is. The closer it is to water, the drier it'll be, and sometimes, wines can get a final specific gravity reading of 0.999, which is considered "very dry."
Now, dryness isn't referring to the feeling the wine imparts on your mouth, but it's referring to how sweet it is. There is such a thing as back-sweetening, where after primary fermentation you rack the wine and add more sugar to sweeten up the wine.
Dessert wines are traditionally sweet, a lot of Rosé wines can be sweet like syrup, it just depends.
What's funny is that carbonation can actually trick your taste buds into believing a drink is sweeter than it actually is. Case in point, many champagnes are actually really dry, but because they're carbonated, they come off as sweeter than they actually are.
The specific gravity of most champagnes are actually lower than water, around 0.996 to 0.992, so they're quite dry, but the carbonation fools your brain into thinking they're sweeter than they actually are.
You have to be careful with sweet alcoholic drinks though, because that can hide to your brain just how much alcohol you're consuming. Meads can be pretty bad at this, especially when you get a sweet one. It's like drinking nectar, but it's booze.
Basically, it just depends on the brew in question. Most of the taste is just due to fermentation, brewing methods, and the sort of flavor they're aiming for. Some things just are unpalatable to some, and that's fine. For me, fermented cherries always taste like cough syrup. Maybe it's the specific cherries I use, but, it's something to think about.
Many drinks, like a lot of foods, are made with a specific recipe and a flavor they're trying to hit. For example I love metheglins, which are spiced meads, and they're spiced with things like cloves, cinnamon, and such in primary fermentation, or they're spiced during the racking process when you let them sit to chill out.
And that's another thing too, there's a reason you sometimes need to let certain brews age or degas a bit. When they're freshly done fermenting that can make them feel and taste more bitter and spiky. Give them time to degas and chill out, and they become better.
Again, it just depends.
