All About Dessert Wine

Dessert wines offer decadent and delicious options to enhance and elevate the after-dinner drinking experience. When paired strategically – a dessert wine can turn a final course into unforgettable sips and splurges. Whether it is red, white, bubbly, still or fortified – a dessert wine is an ideal closer and will have characteristic sweetness and complexity. Surprisingly, dessert wines are often overlooked and exist outside of the range of even the most experienced and widely sampled wine enthusiasts. They are often underappreciated or even unfamiliar, leaving a missed opportunity to create a dynamic dish and dessert wine duo. While there is not an industry definition of what constitutes a dessert wine; among winemakers and experts, these wines are broadly regarded as sweet wines that most commonly pair with a dessert. Or that may be served as a final course to a meal that also measure at or above 14 percent alcohol content. These wines stand out in style, taste and antiquity as well as aesthetics. Dessert wines are commonly corked, caged or capped in specialty bottles that are often narrow, with long tapering necks to stand in a category all their own.

Dessert wines are vinified into hundreds of styles boasting a wide range of sweetness which allows for diverse pairing, enjoyment and graceful aging. Most dessert wines will fall into a lightly sweet, richly sweet, sweet red, sparkling or fortified category - like a sherry and port. Each expresses unique tasting notes, flavor profiles and drinking experiences. Our French and dessert wine expert Atanas Nechkov shares that a common misconception is that all sweet wines are dessert wines. He clarifies that a “…common mistake is to consider every sweet wine to be dessert wine. Only the most concentrated and full-bodied qualify as dessert wines.” The method of creating a dessert wine depends on the region, climate and winemaking practices.

There are three primary ways to make sweet wines including the late harvesting of grapes, the action of noble rot to raisinate the grapes or by adding brandy to stop fermentation and preserve the natural grape sugars that distinguish dessert wines. While each style will be distinctive in taste - shared qualities of dessert wines include intense and concentrated flavors, high levels of residual sugar and richness. Atanas adds that you should expect to enjoy, “…aromas and flavors of dried fruits, pineapple, golden raisins, apricot jam, passion fruit, acacia, honey and ginger notes for the whites and ripe, jammy aromas of currant, blackberry, plum, black cherry, cocoa bean and butterscotch for the reds.” There is also a wide selection of dessert wine glasses that are often as novel as the wines. Try a tulip, diamond, or flute shape to pour and serve chilled.

Read to taste? Browse our dessert wines.

Dessert wines are made around the world where the climate often lends to the winemaking technique used to create sweet wines. The most widely recognized and celebrated dessert wine countries include France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Portugal and Spain. In France, the Sauternes region of Bordeaux is prized for a stunning sweet white wine that features honied white fruit and butterscotch flavors as well as the Loire Valley’s Quarts de Chaume appellation where chenin blanc grapes are used to make a golden and gracious dessert wine. Germany’s contributions to sweet wines include Eiswein, Auslese, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese – all styles that feature late or selected harvest grapes primarily from the Rhine region that are also desired for their bracing acidity. Italy gifts Vin Santo from Tuscany which expresses with caramel and hazelnut flavors, Recioto della Valpolicella - a sweet red made from dried grapes and Recioto di Soave, a sweet white made in the same style.