What is dessert wine? Introduction to the sweet world of wines
Dessert wine – this term crops up repeatedly and can create confusion especially among fairly inexperienced wine connoisseurs: What’s wine got to do with a dessert?
The key points
- Dessert wine is a sweet wine that goes perfectly with sweet desserts.
- It is produced from overripe grapes, by noble rot or in the form of ice wine and liqueur wine with a high alcohol content.
- Dessert wines go well with strong types of cheese.
What makes a dessert wine?
A dessert wine is first and foremost a wine that has a high level of sweetness so that it can accompany a sweet dessert. That’s because one of the key principles for good harmony between food and wine is that the food must never be sweeter than the wine. Or to put it another way, the wine must be just as sweet as the food. If you were to drink a non-sweet, i.e. ‘dry’ wine with a sweet dessert, it would taste unspeakably sour and musty.
How do you get so much sweetness into a wine so that it goes well with a dessert?
Essentially, there are three methods. The best-known version is to produce the dessert wine from very ripe, or even overripe grapes. The very late harvesting of these grapes produces such a high amount of sugar in the berries that they still have a high level of sweetness, which is then also referred to as residual sweetness, even after being fermented into wine. With very high-quality dessert wines of this style, there’s even a further step with the hope of producing infestation of the grapes on the vine by what is known as noble rot. This makes the skin of the berries porous and the water evaporates from them, which causes all the other ingredients, the aroma, the acidity, but also the sweetness, to become much more concentrated. Well-known examples of such noble sweet wines that are produced from berries infested with noble rot are the rare and expensive wines described in German as Beerenauslese or Trockenbeerenauslese.
Dessert wine: special form of ice wine
Another version of concentrated ingredients and sugar in the grapes is found in the no less rare ice wine. This is where the grapes are left to hang on the vine until late in the year with the hope that a frost will occur as early as possible. When there’s a cold temperature of at least minus seven degrees, the frozen grapes are harvested and pressed immediately. In this state, the water in the berries is frozen and is then retained as ice when the berries are pressed. In the small amount of juice that can still be squeezed out of these frozen grapes, the sugar, acid and aroma are then extremely concentrated.
Liqueur wine as dessert wine: a high-alcohol delight
A third group of dessert wines is what are known as liqueur wines, which include port wine and the Muscat wines from southern France, for example. This is where the fermentation of the sweet grape must is interrupted by the addition of alcohol, producing a sweet wine with a high alcohol content.
Incidentally, dessert wines don’t just go well with sweet desserts, but can also be drunk with tart cheeses. One classic example is to combine them with intense blue cheeses like Roquefort or Stilton. The fruity sweetness of the wines helps to soften the salty spiciness of the cheese.
The author
Frank Kämmer
I have worked for many years in high-end restaurants and in this time became one of the top sommeliers in Europe. In 1996, I achieved the title of Master Sommelier, the highest international qualification in my profession. Today, I work primarily as a consultant in the international wine and gastronomy sector. I have also published numerous books on wines and spirits and was the first German to be accepted into the British Circle of Wine Writers.
