Delicious Dessert Wines
Unsurprisingly, dessert wine is normally served to accompany sweet puddings and desserts! Dessert style wines are typically white, very sweet and complement a wide variety of popular desserts. In fact, these wines are often so sweet and unctuous that they can be served instead of a dessert
Production of Dessert Wine
Dessert wines are incredibly sweet (sometimes sickly) because they contain substantially higher levels of sugar than other wines. The sweetness of quality desserts wines derives from the bacteria Botrytis Cinerea or Noble Rot, as it is more commonly known. This bacterium grows on certain vines when the grapes are allowed to over-ripen. Normally, during fermentation, most of the sugar converts to alcohol; however, in grapes with noble rot, much of the sugar remains in the wine, thus creating a sweet dessert wine.
Not all dessert wine is the result of Noble Rot. Any grape that is left to over-ripen can, potentially, be very high in sugar and therefore produce the same result as grapes with Noble Rot. To ensure that they are left to become sufficiently over-ripe, many vineyards actually hang the grapes to allow them dry out. By losing a large volume of their water content, the grapes' sugar content, in turn, becomes far more concentrated.
Serving Dessert Wine
Dessert wine, because of its higher sugar content, tends to last longer when opened compared with other white wines. A bottle can retain its freshness, for several days, provided that it is kept airtight and well refrigerated. While we are on the subject of refrigeration, it's worth noting that dessert wine should be served at around 10 degrees Celsius.
This type of wine is generally drunk for its taste and not in large quantities; a half bottle is ample for two people and often sufficient for four people. Most diners simply treat dessert wine as a liqueur rather than as a wine, hence the smaller volume.
It is well worth trying a dessert wine next time you're in a restaurant; a decent dessert wine can really add that special something to round off a great meal!