Sweet wines attract and introduce “sweet cocktail” drinkers to the wide world of wine. White wines are more popular when it comes to dessert wines, as they tend to be sweeter. Sweeter-styled white wines are easier to find than sweet red wines. Usually when someone does not fancy a dry wine, they will requests for a “sweet wine”. The sweetness in a wine is not contributed only by sugar, there are many other factors. The sweetness can also be influenced by the level of alcohol, acidity, and amount of tannins in the wine.
What Makes a White Wine Sweet?
There are many different kinds of sugar found in grapes. Fructose and glucose help in fermentation. During fermentation, the grape’s sugars are converted to alcohol by yeast. A winemaker has three methods to choose from when it comes to sweetening. 1. Adding sugar to the process. 2. Stopping the fermentation process short, before the yeast consumes all natural sugar. Allowing the residual sugar to offer the sweet “fruit” factor in a wine. Or 3. After fermentation, adding a concentrated grape juice back to the wine, raising the fruit taste.
We can only taste four factors: sweet, salty, sour and bitter, but we can smell thousands of unique aromas. It’s the interplay between our tastebuds and our olfactory functions that allow us to perceive such variety in flavor.
White Wines: Sweet vs. Fruity
When you taste a wine that is particularly “fruit forward,” meaning that you can both smell and taste abundant fruit when drinking the wine, it can be perceived as sweeter than it really is. To discern between true sweet and perceived “fruitiness” you merely have to plug your nose and taste, true sugar persists regardless of aromatic interventions.
How Can You Tell if a White Wine Will Be Sweet?
White wine labels can offer wine detectives initial clues as to the sweetness levels of a wine. Generally speaking, there will be one of two extremes, either the wine will have a really high alcohol content as in a fortified wine like, Sherry, or be low in alcohol content like many of Germany’s Rieslings with ranges of 8-12% alcohol. However, this method falls short in the case of the French Sauternes, which often weigh in at the average for table wine, 14% abv. It’s interesting to note that the International Riesling Foundation has designed a label initiative, the Riesling Taste Profile that allows consumers to determine sweetness levels based on a back of bottle scale. It certainly makes it easier to find a sweet white wine, without all of the guesswork, perhaps it will catch on with other sweet wines.
Types of Sweet White Wines to Try:
- Ice Wines – made from grapes that are frozen on the vine and then pressed and fermented. The result is an incredibly, rich, ultra-sweet dessert wine.
- Moscato – is a semi-sparkling, semi-sweet to sweet, lighter-bodied white wine made from the Moscato grape. It enjoys a tremendous following as the perfect accompaniment to brunch, fruit-based desserts and has even gathered fans in the savory food pairing category. Originally from Italy’s Piedmont region, Moscato takes aromatics to a whole new level. Fresh floral, ripe stonefruit and exotic spice mark an extraordinary perfumed component to this unique sweet wine.
- Sherry – is a fortified wine, produced in southwest Spain’s “Sherry Triangle” from white wine grapes. Sherry is also quite rich and depending on the style can range from dry to super sweet as in the Pedro Ximénez.
- Tokaji – is the famous (and expensive) Hungarian dessert wine that has been serving royalty for centuries. It is made from white wine grape varietals that have been affected by botrytis, noble rot, which results in super concentrated grape sugars and a super sweet white wine gem.
- Late Harvest Wines – are made from grapes that are, as the name indicates, picked later during the harvest season. These grapes may or may not be affected by botrytis, but they will be shriveled a bit regardless and thus have higher levels of concentrated sugar. You’ll find these late harvest dessert wines from all over the world, but Germany and Austria may be the most famous.
- Sauternes – The famed French dessert wine, Sauternes, are also made from grapes that have been affected by botrytis, the noble rot, that renders a grape ugly on the outside and downright delicious on the inside. Like liquid gold, the must from these grapes is intense and amazingly sweet, yet balanced by some hardcore acidity making it both age worthy and undeniably rich. These grapes are picked by hand and yield little juice, so the price will be somewhat of a shock.