Dessert wines are a special category of wine consisting of delicious sweet wines. Precise definitions of dessert wines vary across different countries or regions; there is no universally agreed upon definition of a dessert wine. The making of a dessert wine, given both its sweetness and its often higher-than-average alcohol content, is particularly interesting, since — as you can find out on the “How Wine is Made” page — during the process of fermentation, yeast consumes the sugar in the grape juice to produce alcohol. Therefore, dessert wine makers must increase the sweetness in their product. This can be achieved in a number of ways: grapes can be cultivated so that they contain more sugar than usual; extra sugar can be added before or after fermentation; water can be removed to increase the concentration of existing sugar; or the wine can be “fortified,” i.e., mixed with another source of alcohol, most often brandy. One of the most famous and absolutely delicious dessert wines is Pedro Ximenez, or PX, produced in Spain.
Another special kind of fortified dessert wine is port wine, a Portuguese delicacy, that comes in a sweet, red wine form most of the time. The sweetness and the alcohol content of port wine is quite high, and it can be considered a heavy, full-bodied wine. While making port wine is not restricted to Portugal, European Union guidelines state that only original Portuguese port wines may be labeled as “Port.”
The different types of genuine Portuguese port wine can be divided into two general categories: barrel-aged port and bottle-aged port, depending on the aging process employed. The name of port wine itself comes from the important Portuguese seaport, Porto, which was the main hub of export for this special treat.
A particular type of dessert wine that is produced mainly in Canada and Germany, although it is not unknown in other wine-producing regions, is ice wine. It is called this because the grapes are frozen before the juice is extracted. Ice wine tends to be very sweet, and also very expensive.
