Dessert Wine

Dessert wine is the 'gem' of the wine cellar for the enthusiast. For centuries, dessert wines were the most sought-after wines in the world, but in the course of the last century we have started drinking increasingly 'dryer'. Good dessert wine has become undervalued. Too bad, because the best dessert wines are among the most special wines in the world.

When do you drink a dessert wine?

There we have the first misunderstanding. The name suggests that you only drink them after a meal with a sweet dessert. Nothing could be further from the truth. A good sweet wine is excellent as an aperitif. The combination of a very sweet white wine with a starter of foie gras is classic. Blue cheeses also combine excellently with sweet dessert wines. Semi-sweet white wines go well with salads with blue cheese, nuts and a sweet and sour dressing.

Of course you can combine a sweet wine with a sweet dessert. Make sure that the balance between the dessert and the wine is right. This means that both should be approximately equally sweet. A red Banyuls with a chocolate dessert and a sweet muscat wine with a fruit pudding are delicious classics. After a meal, a sweet dessert wine is also an excellent accompaniment to the cheese board. Especially Port, sweet Sherry (PX) and sweet Madeira are happy to take on this task.

How is dessert wine made?

There are quite a few different types of dessert wine. Broadly speaking, you can distinguish between the following: sweet wine from late harvested grapes, fortified wine, noble sweet wine and ice wine. To understand the distinction, it helps to realize how wine is made: In essence, wine is fermented grape juice. Fermentation means that the sugar in the sweet grape juice is converted into alcohol. The fermentation stops automatically when the wine has reached an alcohol percentage of about 15% because then the yeast cells die.

Fortified dessert wine and Spätlese

You can therefore make dessert wine by adding alcohol halfway through the fermentation to at least 15%. The fermentation then stops while the juice is still sweet. Port, for example, is made this way. Sweet Madeira and sweet Sherry. And also the Vins Doux Naturels from France such as Banyuls and Rivesaltes. The winemaker can also end the fermentation a bit earlier by filtering the yeast cells out of the wine. Winemakers sometimes do this with wine from very late harvested (and therefore very sweet) grapes. Germans and Austrians then call it a sweet Spätlese.

Dessert wines with noble rot

In some vineyards, the grapes can undergo a so-called noble rot in late autumn. With this very specific form of rot, the skin of the grape becomes porous, causing it to lose water and only very sweet juice remains. The grapes shrivel up into thick raisins. This only happens in a few places in the world. The most important are Tokaj in Hungary, Sauternes in France and around the Neusiedlersee in Austria. Sometimes an entire vine is needed to press one gall of noble sweet wine. This type of dessert wine is therefore quite exclusive and not cheap.

Ice wine

In other places, winemakers let their grapes hang until the frost sets in. These grapes may have undergone noble rot, but that is not necessary. They harvest and press the grapes during severe frost and call it Ice wine. The water in the grapes is frozen and only the sweet nectar drips into the barrels. Also very exclusive and quite expensive. Some winemakers in the New World therefore choose to freeze the grapes themselves and then press them. Not as tasty as 'real ice wine' in our opinion, but of course much cheaper. And did you know that Canada is the largest producer of ice wines in the world?