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6 Fascinating Ways to Make Dessert Wine

Dessert wine or sweet wine has fascinated people since its invention. It has a long and interesting history full of kings and nobility. Dessert wines are often some of the most difficult and complicated wines to produce. Through the centuries different areas of the world have come up with interesting and unique methods to make this style of wine.

How is Dessert Wine Made?

To understand how sweet wines are made, it’s first important to understand how dry wines are made. To make a dry wine, you start off with grape juice, and then let this sit out with yeast. The yeast would then start the fermentation by eating the sugars and producing alcohol. This would go on until the yeast finished eating all the sugars and the juice became wine. So the challenge in making sweet wine is to have some amount of alcohol (it is wine after all), while still keeping enough sugars to make the wine sweet. The first and easiest way is to add liquor and create a fortified wine.

The Different Methods

Fortified Dessert Wine

This is created by adding liquor to either unfermented grape juice or slightly fermented grape juice. This will give the sweet wine/juice alcohol, while killing all the yeast before they can eat the sugars, thereby keeping the wine sweet. This is a very popular and easy way to make sweet wines, and this technique is used all over the world. Some examples include Port, Sherry, Madeira, Banyuls, Pineau de Charentes & Floc de Gascogne. There are two different styles of this wine depending on when the liquor is added:

1. Vins Doux Naturels (VDN)

To make this style, liquor is added to grape juice that has already started the fermentation process. In this case the juice has not been allowed to ferment for too long, so there are still plenty of sugars present to keep the finished product sweet. This is how Port, Sherry, Madeira, and Banyuls are made.

2. Vins de Liqueurs (VDL)

Here the liquor is added before any of the grape juice has time to ferment. Generally the liquor imparts more flavor to this style of fortified wine compared to a VDN. This style is often produced in areas famous for liquor production. Examples include Pineau des Charentes fortified with Cognac and Floc de Gascogne fortified with Armagnac.

Unfortified Dessert Wine

If we aren’t going to add liquor to preserve the sweetness in our wine, we need to figure out another way to make the finished product both sweet and alcoholic. This is most often accomplished by starting with much sweeter grape juice than most wines. In order to obtain this some of the water content within the grape must be removed, thereby making the juice more concentrated and sweet. Different areas of the world have figured out unique ways of doing this:

3. Ice Wine

Originally developed in Germany, this technique requires leaving the grapes on the vine until winter. Then the grapes are harvested and pressed while the grapes are still frozen (You start harvesting very early in the morning before anything has a chance to thaw!). When the grapes freeze, only part of the water content freezes, the sugars remain in a liquid form. So when pressed, the frozen water stays with the solids of the grape and you end up with a very small amount of juice that is both very sweet and concentrated. Canada is now one of the largest producers of this style of wine.

4. Partially Dried Grapes

This is a very ancient technique, even thought to have been used in Ancient Greece. After the harvest, instead of immediately pressing the grapes, you leave the grapes to dry in the sun, usually on straw. After some time a portion of the water in the grape evaporates. So when the slightly dried grapes are pressed you end up with a more concentrated, sweeter juice. This is a style that goes by many names, depending on where in the world it is made. In Italy it is called Vin Santo, Passito or Recioto depending on the region. In France, it is called Vin de Paille and is most commonly made in Jura. This technique is also used to make certain styles of Sherry in Spain.

5. Late Harvest

This is very similar to the last technique, except instead of drying the grapes after harvesting, the grapes are left to slightly dry on the vine. This technique can be a bit more tricky, as the perfect climatic conditions are needed to keep the grapes from rotting before they dry out. This style is made in many areas of the world. Some of the most famous examples come from Germany, Alsace, and Jurançon.

6. Noble Rot

Like with late harvest wines, the grapes are left on the vine, and harvested much later. However, these grapes are left in hopes they will develop a special type of fungus, called botrytis. Botrytis dehydrates the grape, concentrates the sugars, and gives a distinctive taste and aroma. This is only possible in very specific climates with humid mornings and dry afternoons. Because of the very specific conditions needed, it is not always possible for the grapes to develop botrytis every year. The most famous examples are Sauternes and Tokaji.

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