"late harvest" news and stories

In my introduction to the Basics of Dessert Wines, Ice Wines and my review on Alvear Pedro Ximénez De Anada 2003, I briefly mentioned late harvest, raisin wines, and The Noble Rot. Now it is time to delve a bit deeper into these subjects to explain why dessert wines are so sweet and luscious.

Late Harvest Wines- This is exactly what it sounds like. The grapes are left on the vines for an extended period of time. They grow sweeter and riper, first becoming swollen, and then slowly dehydrate, losing moisture and partially drying out until they start to get slightly shriveled in appearance. As this happens the sugar levels slowly increase to higher, and yet higher levels as the weeks and sometimes months go by.

Sometimes the dehydration process is helped along by workers going through the vineyards and twisting the bunches of grapes, forcing the vines to crush and squeeze shut so that very little or no moisture can get into the grapes. This causes concentrating of the sugars and complex chemical changes and compounds being developed within the grapes, which the French call passerillage.

Dessert wines are fascinating to me, not only for their scrumptious sweet tastes, but also for the many complicated and unusual ways in which they are made. Most, but not all dessert wines tend to be higher in alcohol than regular wines. This is due to the large amount of sugars in the fresh juice, the more sugar, the greater the final alcohol levels produced during fermentation.

In taste these wines have a bold array of flavors like honey, apricot, peach, tropical fruit, caramel, dates, raisins, citrus, berries, floral notes, and much more. In body they progress from thin, light and barely sweet; to syrupy thick, sugar bombs. In color they run the spectrum from pale white to deep gold and light rose to orange and deep red. In style they can be still wines, slightly fizzy, or super bubbly tongue tinglers.

I use the term dessert wine to describe all wines that are mid to high quality, sweet wines that tend to be drunk after dinner or with dessert, or more appropriately as dessert, since many sweet wines actually don't go well when paired with sweet foods. Sweet and dessert wines have been around since the early days of the Roman Empire, some say even longer. They may have been the first wines that traveled outside the region in which they were made. This is because many of them have higher alcohol levels, as well as the large amounts of sugars; both of which when combined help to make wines age and travel well.