Making Dessert Wines

Unlike many other terms in the world of wine, calling something a dessert wine does not have particular rules attached to it, but many of the wines that we call dessert wines do. That's nice. We've written about some of them and might choose to write about others in the future, but that's not our issue today. Today, we are breaking dessert wines into a few classifications and learning a little bit about how they are made and what makes them different from each other.

In a nutshell, wines classified as dessert wines tend to have an element of sweetness to them. They have residual sugar in sufficient levels that they will be sweeter than the dessert with which you are pairing them (a great way to ruin a dessert experience is to pair a wine almost as sweet as the dessert you are pairing it with as the wine should be sweeter). However, there are dry dessert wines, largely some Sherry and Madeira.

All that said, a dessert wine is whatever you want it to be. If you want to serve Boone's Farm or Mad Dog 20/20 with your dessert, go for it, but don't expect food and wine snobs to be knocking on your door.

Today, we are going to stick to three styles or methods of making dessert wines: oxidizing, fortifying, and harvesting late. Each produces a different style and different characteristics and many people have preferences one way or another.

Oxidizing 

Normally, exposing a wine to oxygen is considered to be problematic. In fact, much of the purpose of stopping a wine bottle with a cork is to prevent the wine from oxidizing. So, why would we want to oxidize a wine when winemakers have spent thousands of years working to ensure that wines would not oxidize.

Probably the best example of a wine that despite going through oxidation is incredibly ageworthy is Madeira (at a restaurant with a quite expansive list several years ago, I had the opportunity to taste at a very reasonable price a 1907 Madeira). What you get from the oxidation process is a particularly nutty wine often with good salinity, and a sense of oiliness, much like you would get in high-quality undried nuts. Imagine that with a caramel based deeset.

Fortification

Other dessert wines are fortified. In particular, think Port although there are many others. In the fortification process, fermentation is stopped by the addition of usually a spirit, often a neutral grape brandy. When the fermentation is stopped, the natural sugars in the grape are preserved rather than completing the natural process of sugar conversion. Without the fortification, these would be extremely sweet, yet low alcohol wines, but because the brandies do have significant alcohol, these wines are typically high in alcohol (18% or more ABV) and hgih in residual sugars.

Classic pairings with Port, particularly Vintage Port, are sharp cheeses (think Stilton or Cheddar) and dried fruite (think dates, figs, and similar fruits).

Late Harvest

Late harvest wines are what they sound like. The grapes are left on the vine longer than normal. In doing so, several things might happen and each of these produce slightly different styles of wine:

• Eiswein or Ice Wine -- the grapes are left on the vine until they freeze. Then, they are pressed while they are frozen causing only the sugars to come out of the grapes during the press. This method, pinneered in Germany and very popular in the eastern part of Canada, produces wines with exceptionally high levels of sweetness on the palate. In fact, those levels are shocking and found to be repulsive by some. If you can't handle really sweet, don't go for these wines. On the other hand, they can and do stand up to the sweetest of desserts.
• Traditional Late Harvest -- the grapes are left on the vine for an extended period of time, but not long enough to freeze (of course the climate is often such that they would never freeze). While the grapes continue to hang, the brix level increases producing a wine with more natural sugars.
• Botrytized or Noble Rot -- Botrytis or noble rot is a fngus that attacks grapes. By leaving the grapes on the vine and not picking until Botrytis sets in, the grapes take on a natural sweetness. Botrytis does well in fog. So, in a particularly foggy region, when grapes, usually white, are left on the vine for seemingly too long, the grapes are coated with this otherwise horrible sounding fungus. They produce a sweet wine characterized by honey, saffron, and ginger, as well as the natural flavors of the underlying grapes. Classic pairings for botrytized dessert wines include foie gras and other pates.