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Dessert wines feel as though they belong in hand cut crystal glass held by Marie Antoinette as she parties in Versailles. Their best pairing seems to be playing cards and complaining about the latest peasant revolt. They sound delicious and opulent but from another time and place. Even the way these wines are made is starting to seem a bit out of place. The conversation in wine continues to move toward natural, organic and low intervention. And there is a growing awareness of how the wines we drink are being manipulated in the winery. A scrutiny that many dessert wines can not stand up to.
Dessert wines are tricky and expensive to make. Before jumping into the specifics, there are really two categories of these wines; fortified, (those with a liquor added) and unfortified, (those without any liquor). Fortified dessert wines have fared much better than their counterpart in the last decade or so. Sherry, and Madeira to a slightly lesser extent, have both benefited from a small revitalization. While unfortified dessert wines seem to fall further and further into the history books.
One reason for this is there really are a lot of bad examples of sweet wine on the market. These wines are not easy to make; their high sugar content makes these wines much more unstable than dry wines. Without proper precautions, these wines can start fermenting again, which would decrease the sugar level and increase the alcohol level, making a whole different style of wine. Right now the best way to make these unfortified sweet wines stable is to add sulfur, which stops the yeast from eating the sugars. After that you then to filter the wine to remove these yeasts. And we aren’t talking about tiny doses of sulfur, dessert wines have the highest levels of sulfites compared to other styles of wine. For example the European Union allows a maximum amount of 200 mg/L of sulfur in dry white wines, 150 mg/L in dry red wines, and 300 gm/ L to 400 gm/L in sweet wines. These wines are heavily sulfured to not only ensure the fermentation is stopped, but also to protect the wines from defaults. With such a large amount of sugar these wines are at a higher risk of bacteria entering the wine and ruining the taste. The high levels of sulfur is to both keep the wine from re-fermenting as well as protect it from bacteria. In addition to large amounts of sulfur, these wines often lack acidity. Without enough acidity, sweet wines become overly sweet and cloying very fast. When you have a beverage with so much sugar, acidity is needed to cut through the sweetness to balance out the wine. It’s really no surprise dessert wines have been left to history, they are often overly sweet and overly sulfated. Two traits that wine drinkers today are less than enthusiastic about.
Recently, I have met someone who is changing how sweet wine is made and is finally putting a long overdue modernization to this style of wine. Oddly enough this wine is being made in Jurançon, in the Southwest of France. To be completely clear, I am talking about Jurançon, not Jura, aside from four letters and a common language these two places have little in common with each other. While Jura’s heyday seems to be in the last decade, Jurançon’s was back in the 1500s when the future King Henry IV of France had a bit of Jurançon wine put on his lips as part of his baptism. While Jurançon makes some dry white wines, it is most famous for a sweet wine made from the grape, Petit Manseng. This is not Sauternes, its Northern neighbor, which relies on botrytis, or noble rot to infect the grapes to concentrate them enough to make sweet wine. Here there is a hot, dry wind coming from Spain that helps dry out these grape bunches on the vine, creating concentrated, super sweet grapes to create this sweet wine.
At Chateau Lafitte, Antoine is making sweet wines for modern times. He is one of the very, very few producers I have ever ever heard of making non fortified sweet wines without sulfur or filtration. Instead, he takes late harvest Petit Manseng, presses it and then puts it in small glass containers called demijohns. He then takes these and leaves them outside on the roof of the winery for three to four years. Here they are exposed to everything, heat, cold, day, night, rain, and sun. This exposure to all the elements stops the fermentation leaving the wine sweet. It also oxidizes the wine, giving the finished product an additional acid boost. This is apparently a traditional method from Catalonia called sol i serena. The finished product is a perfectly balanced delicious wine.
Antoine is also making a second sweet wine without sulfur or filtration by using a solera system, a system most commonly used to make Sherry in Spain. This is a very small solera with just three levels and three barrels total. So every year, some wine is taken from the bottom barrel to be bottled and sold. To replace this wine, wine is taken from the middle barrel and moved to the bottom, and from the top barrel and moved to the middle. Finally, the new wine from that year is added to the top or first barrel. Normally, a solera is used to ensure a consistent and quality product each year. However, Antoine has a different purpose for using a solera method. His goal is that the wine that has been in the barrel longer, and has stopped its fermentation will encourage the new, young wine to do the same. So far he is able to get the wine to slow down the fermentation, but not completely stop it. So for now, he adds a bit of liquor before bottling the sweet wine to ensure the wine stops its fermentation and remains sweet. His solera was created in 2016 and he is hoping in time that his solera will be able to completely stop the fermentation on its own, although he does not expect this to happen for many years or even decades. Like the first sweet wine this is also an oxidized wine, as the barrels are not completely full allowing air to come into contact with the wine.
In both wines the sweetness, the oxidization, and the acid Petit Manseng is known for, all work together to create a balanced wine that is never cloying or overly sweet in your mouth. It’s definitely not a sweet wine that you will open and leave in your fridge for two months because you can’t find the right opportunity to drink it. You’re more likely to have the opposite problem of trying to limit you and your guests’ glasses. Showing as proof that this once famous style of wine can again be relevant, when made correctly. So go ahead, make Marie Antoinette and King Henry IV proud and pour yourself a glass.
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