RANKINGS
‘STICKY’ SWEETS FOR THE SWEET A top 10 list of kosher dessert wines
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By Joshua E. London
ne of life’s indispensable staples—along with a wide variety of red and white table wines and, of course, sparkling wines—are quality sweet wines. While typically referred to as “dessert” wines (or as “stickies” by wine aficionados, and often served with, or even as, the dessert course), sweet wines need not be the final wine of a meal or social engagement. Indeed, pairing such wines with sweet foods, or reserving them for the end of the meal, is more of a fashionable guideline than a firm rule. Also note that while kiddush or sacramental wines are still a popular, if highly particularistic, type of sweet wine, it is a rather simple, limited style. In fact, the quality sweet wine category in the kosher market is vibrant, offering consumers many fabulous choices. A quality-focused sweet wine is, simply put, a table wine that has been purposefully produced with noticeable amounts of unfermented (or residual, in wine-speak) sugar so that some level of sweetness can be tasted on the palate. The term “sweet” is inexact, but generally a wine tastes sweet due to the levels of residual sugar it contains. The actual impact or perception of this residual sugar on one’s palate is largely understood to be significantly influenced by such factors as serving temperature
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and the relative levels of acidity, tannins and carbon dioxide in the wine. Alcohol, glycerol and high levels of pectins can also present as a noticeably sweet taste. There are all sorts of methods for producing sweet wine. At the simplest, and typically inexpensive end of the quality scale, wine producers can simply add sugar or concentrated grape juice to wine that has been stripped of any ability to evolve or re-ferment. Another approach, common with port-style wines, is to add distilled alcohol to sweet fermenting grape juice to halt fermentation in its tracks; the added alcohol effectively fortifies the wine against further fermentation. Yet another method is to stop fermentation by stunning the yeast
MARCH 2021 / NISAN 5781
with sulfur dioxide or by chilling before all the natural, or added, sugar has been consumed. Even before focusing on the juice or wine, there are also methods that can be directed upon the grapes themselves, either while still on the vine or before the juice has been pressed from the berries. Grapes can, for example, simply be harvested later; that is, left longer on the vine than would be necessary to produce dry wine. This additional growing period allows the grape’s berries to ripen further and grow naturally richer, promoting higher levels of sugar, allowing for higher natural residual sugar post-fermentation. Grapes can also be deliberately left well past normal ripening on the vine to desiccate and shrivel into super-sweet raisins, which can then be vinified into sweet wine. An alternative version of this dried-grape approach entails purposefully drying the grapes after they’ve been harvested but before they’ve been vinified. Alternatively, in suitably cold climates the grapes can be left so long on the vine that they naturally freeze, thereby concentrating the juice without the raisining (drying grapes naturally in the air) experience—as in ice wine, or Eiswein. Such freezing can also be done artificially, if desired. Far riskier, however, is the practice—a very traditional approach in some wine regions—of waiting
