Sweeten Me Up

By Sylvia Jansen, DipWSET, CSW, Sommelier

Do you feel you are too grown up for sweet wine?

Humans have a troubled relationship with sugar. Some of us embrace it by reading the dessert menu first. Others avoid it for dietary restrictions or general health. But any careful diabetic will tell you that avoiding sugar means being wary. Inside many energy drinks, ketchup, barbecue sauces, and flavoured coffees are often loads of sugar. It is simultaneously a guilty pleasure, a forbidden fruit, and a secret agent.

When it comes to wine, there are layers of history and social pressures on top of those considerations. Especially in North America, we have come to think that sweet in wine is bad. We believe that if we are sophisticated wine lovers, we should want dry wine. This new norm is a hangover from masses of poor-quality sweet table wines from the last decades of the 20th century. Those wines were justly condemned by experts and critics; over time, we learned to snub sweet wines.

During this shift, we also turned our backs on classic sweet wines of the world, which actually rank among the most beautiful wines imaginable. These are the result of timeconsuming, weather-dependent, skilled work that brings the natural sweetness of the fruit to the fore.

There are several ways to make a wine sweet. Concentrating grape sugars through the special combination of ripe fruit, misty mornings, sunny afternoons, and a fungus called botrytis (“noble rot”) creates classics such as French Sauternes, German Trockenbeerenauslese, and Hungarian Tokaji. Drying grapes after harvest also concentrates sugars, which is where Italians have excelled: Recioto and Vin Santo are two fine examples. Freezing grapes on the vine (separating sweet nectar from water) gives us Canadian Icewine. The Portuguese are masters of adding grape spirit to fermenting juice to stop fermentation, resulting in sweet, fortified classics.

But be wary: sweetness can also be added to a dry wine, a technique that is neither new nor noble. Many branded wines use it, often added as syrupy rectified concentrated grape must (RCGM). This adjustment softens rough edges and brings fruitiness forward. That process can make wines like Meiomi Pinot Noir weigh in with a whopping 28 grams per litre—almost 2 tablespoons of sugar in every bottle. For Apothic red, the finished wine is about 15 grams per litre. But if we are told a wine is dry, we tend to believe it. Tasting notes freely available about these wines mention “juicy strawberry flavour and notes of dark berries”; ”complexity and depth”; “silky layers . . . a soft, plush mouthfeel . . . a hint of intrigue.” Considering that such wines are objectively sweet, yet marketed as regular table wines, it is indeed a bit of intrigue.

Classic sweet wines, on the other hand, are not soft pillows but rather tight-rope walkers: focused, balanced, and utterly amazing. A dessert of Vin Santo with hazelnut biscotti is a lovely way to end a meal. There is also true poetry in pairing sweet wine with savoury dishes: a sweet German Riesling, balanced by racy acidity, can weave charm over a fiery Thai dish. Not long ago, I was lucky enough to attend a special banquet in Europe that showcased famous wines. Mid-way through the meal was a rich, salty dish served with a glass of 15-year-old Sauternes. It was heaven. The sweetness was no secret agent, but the star of the pairing.

Here’s to you, the classically sweet.