Dessert Wines - Sweet Wines - Ice Wines - Late Harvest

The Underworld of Legendary Sweet Wines

Rotten Grapes, Mouthwatering Fungal Funk, Barnyard Stench, 

Snow Jobs, and Respectable Shrinkage

  

$130,000 paid for a single bottle of white wine stands as a record, while $2,300,000 was spent once coughed up for a collection of sweet wines from the famous Château d’Yquem in Bordeaux that included a bottle from every successful vintage from 1860-2003. 

Would you be even more astonished to know that these treasured liquid were produced entirely from grapes that were infected and rotting with fungus right up until they were harvested?

Botrytis cinerea (Botrytis) is affectionately known to makers of sweet wine as “Noble Rot”. Botrytis is a fungus that eats its way below the skin of the grapes, piercing and sucking on the grapes internal organs.  No doubt proper magnification would reveal the extending and retracting of some horrible festering phallus in and out of that vulnerable grape meat.  After the Rot has had its way the grapes look like deflated, sickly, balloons.  The bunches resembles a moldy looking blob made by the third assistant to the underpaid effects specialist in some crappy 1970’s science fiction movie. 

These visual disasters, however, provide a hidden blessing for the maker of sweet wines.  Such fungal parties end up leeching out so much moisture from the grapes that they can be thought of as biological dehydration machines.  The remaining grape ghosts are rich in sugars and dissolved compounds.  In other words, humans now consider what the lowly fungus disregards as pure winemaking gold.  The most famous dessert wines in the world - Aszu from Tokaj-Hegyalja in Hungary, and Sauternes from Bordeaux, France, are made from this exact rotten opus.

How did all this start?  Similar to the Ice Wine story, below, someone, somewhere went ahead and tried to produce wine from clearly unsuitable grapes, and it is hard to imagine their intentions were pure.  

In the case of fungus-laden grapes, such hucksters blatantly ignored every evolutionary and gustatory alarm bell that went off in his or her head.  No doubt they hoped to mix the resultant tarn in with “real” wines, or sell it all off to some unsuspecting consumer.  Such evil plans were instantly forgotten after those first historic, delicious, sips.  It seems that wine’s earliest crimes did indeed pay.

IceWine - Eisewein

In 1794, near Wurzburg in Northern Bavaria, a winemaker awoke to what he thought was his worst nightmare. The man despondently squinted at a horizon of white death, he had been caught by an unexpected overnight frost.  As he poured some schnapps into his morning coffee, a waft of steam and alcohol preyed on his now weary eyes. His grapes that had been painstakingly tended for so many months were now suspended in time and ice.  The winemaker was stunned, his only source of income completely decimated.  He could not help but envision the fields before him as his own flat and empty billfold. Perhaps it was more schnapps, perhaps true desperation, but later that morning his eyes flickered clear, and what he did next changed the way wine was made forever.

Heretofore, the crop would have been termed a loss, and the vintage scrapped. Yet, instead of giving up, he mustered his harvestmen and set out to collect the frozen grape balls and proceed with normal winemaking.  

Then, as now, the work was tedious - bitterly cold, and the presses and other machinery designed for room temperature grape mashing were now expected to handle frozen, hard chunks of ice.  The winemakers doubted themselves at every process, and almost gave up numerous times.  Nothing was known until much later, when Mr. Frugal had his first taste, and it was an encounter that stunned him.  Magnificent, rich, and all together new flavors had materialized out of the white abyss.  

The eisewein had cometh.

 

            The deep sweetness and new flavors are thought to materialize from lowered water content and the action of ice crystals puncturing the grape skins.  The icy lacerations produce vigorous flavor extractions, and the water loss simply results in a higher sugar and dissolved solids content in the fermentable juice.  


            Interestingly then, one man’s simple desperation to salvage his grapes may have directly lead to an entire modern day industry of sweet and dessert wines.  


            Next time you order a pricy icewine, take a minute to ponder its frugal start.

There are a couple other main ways sweet wines are produced, and chief among these are “late” harvesting techniques, which allow the grapes a slow death on the vine.  As water leaves the grapes, their sugar and solids content rises.  The Italians achieve a similar end by causing their sweet wine grapes to dehydrate after they are harvested.

Famous sweet wines and regions also include the Rheingau in Germany, Chile, South Africa, and Australia.