Home > Learning Center > Sweet Wine

Sweet Wine

Sweet wines can be a delicious addition to many meals and desserts, or they can be drunk alone as a tasty treat. Compared with other wines they are much less acidic and have less tannins, so the fruit flavor is enhanced without any bitterness. They are also made slightly different from other wines. The grapes in a sweet wine are often picked during a hard frost so they are frozen.

When the frozen grapes are pressed, the sugars are concentrated and separated from the water providing the beginnings for a sweet wine called ice wine or “elswein”. Because the grapes are also picked in late fall the fruit is very ripe and flavorful. Even late harvest grapes that have dried on the vine make excellent sweet wines.

Another sweet wine is made because of the fungus known among vintners as noble rot, which attacks grapes in late autumn, eating their sugars. It is disastrous for most wines, but is encourage for many dessert wines and is known as Botrysis, after the fungus. Other ways of making a wine sweet are using dehydrated grapes, or fortifying the wine with brandy making port.

Wine | Organic | Learning Center | Site Map | Links | Contact | Home

Copyright © 2010