Dessert Wine Guide: Port, Sherry, Madeira, and More

Hi, I'm Eric Taylor from Bottles in Providence, Rhode Island. Today I'm talking about one of my favorite categories of wine, often overlooked, dessert wines. Dessert wines are one of the best values in the entire store, and I feel like a lot of people don't know about them, or they feel like they don't like them, or they don't even think about it when they're getting wines together for a big dinner party or a holiday meal. So dessert wines can be broken down, I think, into three major categories. There's the Ports and Madeiras, and then there's Cherries, and then there's everything else, which I like to call the Sweet and Stickies. These things include ice wines, Moscatos, late harvest wines, and we'll talk a little bit more about them. But to do that, let's go over to our dessert wine section here in the store, and I'll point out some of my favorites. So now we're over here in the dessert wine section of the store, and let me help break down the big categories of dessert wines. We're going to start with Ports, and if I can polarize Ports, they come into two major categories as far as I'm concerned. The first category are Tawney Ports. Tawneys are a little bit lighter, they're almost translucent, you can see through them, and the flavors are more like caramel, maybe a little bit of nuttiness, and they're not as sweet and rich and dense as the rest of the Ports, whether they're a proprietary bottling, like these guys, or they're a late vintage bottled Port, or a vintage Port. All of these other Ports are very rich, full-bodied, dark in color, and have a much more pronounced dried fruit flavor to them. The next category of dessert wines I want to talk about are Madeiras. These come from the Madeira Island off the coast of Portugal, and they're similar to Ports, but they are, instead of the way Port is traditionally made, they are cooked and shook for a long period of time. This is because back in colonial days, Madeiras were transported in the hulls of ships as they sailed across the Atlantic to the colonies, to America, and as they went down into the Caribbean, the wine would heat up and would create this very distinct flavor that is Madeira. Flavors that you can expect from Madeira are a little bit of a cooked, dried fruit flavor, nuttiness like almonds, very, very delicious. Madeiras come in a variety of sweetness, from medium dry all the way to very, very sweet. The next category of dessert wines I want to talk about are Cherries. Cherries are a very broad category, and they range from bracingly dry, very, very dry wines, to very, very sweet wines. Cherries are very unique because they're oxidized, and it's a very unique flavor that's hard to describe, but they are different than Madeiras and Ports. Pedro Jimenez is a very delicious sweet cherry, as is the East India Solera, and they are great with blue cheeses, aged Goudas, things like that. The last category of dessert wines I want to talk about are things that I call sweet and stickies. These wines include ice wines, Tokai, Bagnol, Sauternes, and they are grown all over the world. A lot of these wines are late harvest wines in that the grapes are left on the vine for a longer period of time to concentrate their flavor, or they're ice wines where they're left in the vineyard until a frost. The frost sweetens the juice that's left in the grape and makes it much more delicious and concentrated. So how do you know which dessert wine is right for you? I think it's easiest to put all of these different dessert wines into flavor buckets. So Ports have deep, dark, dried fruit flavors, things that are a little bit richer and fuller-bodied, and taste more like blackberries, dried fruits, things like that. The Madeiras and the Cherries are a little bit more interesting because they have those dark, dried fruit flavors, but they have an interesting oxidized quality about them that we talked about. And then the last category is the sweet and stickies, and these have fresher stone fruit flavors like peaches and nectarines and honeysuckle. And so it depends on what kind of dessert that you have, what kind of flavors that you like to enjoy. But I hope this video helps. This is a big category. If you have any questions, please come in and talk to any one of us. We'd love to help you with your dessert wine selection. I'm here to tell you that Rieslings are not always sweet. No other wine causes people to wax poetic than Pinot Noir.