Dessert wine

The main fortified wines drunk with dessert are sweet Montilla-Moriles & sherry, particularly Pedro Ximénez, and vins doux naturels.

The production of vins doux naturels was perfected by Arnaud de Villeneuve at the University of Montpellier in the 13th century.

Northern Italy is home to a number of 'passito' wines, where the grapes are dried on straw, on racks, or hung from the rafters.

Across the Alps, the French make 'straw wine' (vin de paille) in the Jura, Rhone and Alsace; the Spanish start off making a raisin wine with Pedro Ximénez before fortifying it; the Cypriots have their ancient Commandaria; and there have been recent experiments with the style in South Africa and the US.

If the grapes are pressed while frozen, a very concentrated must can result, which needs special yeast and a long time to ferment.

The most famous are German Eiswein and Canadian Icewine, but ice wines are also made in the United States, Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Italy, Australia, France and New Zealand in smaller quantities.

Descriptors frequently used for these wines highlight flavours of peach, apricot, pear, quince, raisin, and honey, along with unique "botrytis" or roti characteristics.

Additionally, a notable feature of botrytized wines is their high acid content, which prevents them from tasting cloying, even with sugar levels often exceeding 200 g/l[6] Some of the most famous dessert wines, such as Tokaji Aszú of Tokaj-Hegyalja in Hungary, Château d'Yquem of Sauternes, and Seewinkel of Austria, are made using grapes mouldy with Botrytis cinerea, which sucks water out of the grape whilst imparting flavours of honey and apricot to the future wine.

Typically, noble rot forms best in conditions with regular morning mist, normally from a nearby lake or the sea.

The first noble rot wines were likely created by accident—both the Hungarians and the Germans have similar stories of how the harvest was delayed for some reason, but the mouldy grapes were vinified anyway and then found to be delicious.

[10] Alternatively, the wine itself can be a dessert, but bakery sweets can make a good match, particularly with a little bitterness like biscuits that are dunked in Vin Santo.

[11] A development of this matching of contrasts is a rich savoury dish like the foie gras that is a traditional partner to Sauternes.