Wines To Make The Perfect Dessert

People
often run away screaming if you mention dessert wines in polite company in Britain. They
are seen as too sweet, and something that old people are seen drinking. When
dessert wines are mentioned in the rest of Europe
however, there is an astonishing amount of reverence and respect that they are
given. They are often best appreciated alone at the end of a meal or with fruit
or baked sweets such as almond biscuits.

In
Britain
we are currently beyond the dessert wine sophistication, but perhaps it is a
trend that we should consider taking up. We have no definition of dessert wine,
we see any sweet wine as such and tend to put all comers in the bracket. In
fact, we add fortified wines such as port and madeira into the dessert wine
bracket, when in fact they are a different product altogether.

As
a general rule of thumb the wine should be sweeter than the dessert it is
served with. Therefore a dessert wine is inappropriate with a very sweet toffee
or chocolate dessert, and most suited to a lemon dessert, which is less sweet
or almond biscuits which have none of the sour taste.

Wine
makers who produce such wines want to make their wine as sweet as possible, and
therefore these wines should contain high amounts of sugar and alcohol. To
increase the content of sugar and alcohol in the wine, many simply add sugar or
alcohol to the process of wine making. The Germans who are great lovers of
sweet wine have coined a phrase ‘süss reserve’ which means reserve of
sweetness. This is when unfermented grape juice is added to the wine after
fermentation. This increases the sweetness of the wine but lowers the alcohol
content. This also reduces the usage of sulphites in the wine.

Another
way that is used to produce dessert wines is to use mouldy grapes. Although
this sounds like a completely bizarre thing to do ‘on purpose’ it has produced
some of the most famous dessert wines of all time. It can’t be any old mould
though. There are only two types of mould so far that can be used for this
purpose: Botrytis Cinera is used to suck water out of the grape, whilst passing
the new flavours of honey and apricot to the future wine; noble rot is used on
Riesling grapes to produce famous wines from German river valley whites to
sparkling ‘sekt’. These wines are late harvested, and were probably first
created by accident.

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