The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Sweet Wine | How to choose wine + My recommendations

Hello everybody and welcome back to my channel. Hi if you're new I'm Melissa and I make fashion, beauty, and lifestyle content here on this channel. Today we're going to be talking about something super super exciting. I have been doing some searching and sourcing to find the perfect wines for beginners. So when I first started drinking wine it was a super scary big world that I knew nothing about. There's so many different wines from so many different regions and even just taking a stroll down the alcohol aisle in your local grocery store there are so many so many picks and I found myself wasting some money on picks that I didn't like because I knew nothing about wine. I have been searching and sourcing wines for about a year now so let's jump into my top picks and also some tips for navigating the world of wine if you are an absolute beginner and know nothing. So the first tip that I have is to decide if you are going to be a sweet wine drinker or a dry wine drinker. To me sweet wines are a little bit more approachable they're not as like tannic or for lack of better words they don't like dry out your mouth like a dry wine does. I find those to be way too intense for me so I'm definitely a sweet wine girl. So just know going into this I have a bias towards sweet wines they're what I prefer and honestly I wish somebody would have told me a little bit more about the difference between dry and sweet wines when I first started out. So just to give you an idea some key words that you can look for when you're looking at a wine is something that of course says sweet and also I'm going to tell you a little bit about the different kind of varieties of wine that come in sweet versions. So on the back of this one it says, this is a Moscato by the way, on the back of it it says it's a semi-sweet wine. So typically when I'm trying to find a sweet wine I'm going to be looking for Moscatos, Brichetto di Achis, sometimes it'll say it's a sweet rosé and if you're looking at a white wine or something like a sparkling wine like champagne it's going to say something like Demisec, Dolce, something like that and that would indicate that is a sweeter wine. So another quick point that I wanted to bring up before I dive into my top picks is that there is a pendulum swing that kind of goes on between there being sweetness to a wine and its alcohol content. So typically the sweeter a wine is the less alcohol content it has and typically the more alcohol content it has the less sweet it is. Now there's definitely exceptions to the rule like champagnes that are like Demisec, they can be sweet but also have a high alcohol content and for beginners I would recommend first picking out wines that have a lower alcohol content like a white Zinfandel, a Riesling, a Moscato. Those varieties of wines are typically going to have less of a bite from the alcohol, you're not going to feel the dryness in your mouth from the alcohol so it's kind of easier on the palate. Personally I do not like wines if they're over 8% alcohol. I feel like 8% is my max. If it's over 8% I'm going to use it for cooking, that's how I like to buy my wine. So if you're going down the wine aisle what you can do is look at either the front of the label or the back of the label and try to see the alcohol percentage. If it's under we'll say 8% it's probably a good chance that it's also going to be sweet because wines don't really have a nutrition label so you can't in all cases find out how many grams of sugar is in that bottle of wine. There's the other indicators that I talked about that can help indicate to you if it's a sweet wine or not like the wording, the alcohol percentage, and the variety of grapes used. So first up I'm going to tell you my recommendation for Moscato. Moscato is a wine it comes from I think it's called like the Moscat grape. Rinaldi is an amazing brand that I have found that has a really good price point. All the wines that they produce are so flavorful. I have tried so many Moscatos in my day and these are honestly my favorite. These are typically a little bit more sweet so sometimes what I do if I don't want the wine to be super punchy with sweetness I will dilute it with some sparkling water. Again I'm not sure if that's something that is common practice but it's just what I do to make what I call a little wine spritzer. It makes it super approachable and honestly this one is the most flavorful Moscato I have tried in my entire life and like I said I've been having Moscato for a really long time. This one is six percent alcohol and this is considered a sweet white wine and also there's another thing that I look for when I'm buying an Italian wine. There's something called a DOCG. I'm not going to be able to pronounce the long version of that but it's basically saying that this is a wine that's produced in a specific region to specific quality standards. So if I'm looking at a French wine I'm going to go for a bottle that says AOC somewhere on it and when I'm looking at Italian wines I typically try to find something that says DOCG and also has a vintage so this one's a 2020. That means all the grapes were grown and harvested in 2020 and it's just another indicator of quality on a wine. So this Moscato has amazing notes to it. I'm going to put up the notes to all the wines on the side so you can see and read for yourself if you'd be interested in this but again Rinaldi is a brand that I would recommend for a sweet sparkling wine like a Moscato. There's also another brand I found at Publix. This is the Castello del Poggio brand. This one's also from Italy. It's a Moscato and I wanted to mention it. It's not as flavorful and in my opinion it's not as good as a Rinaldi Moscato but I think it's really important also if you're a beginner to look for wines with a screw top. So a screw top allows you to just easily store your wine for later use. You could buy a wine stopper but I've had issues in the past with wine stoppers kind of popping off in my fridge and not being the best quality and so if you don't want to invest even more into your drinking experience by buying different wine stoppers just make sure you look for wines that have this little screw top so you can easily store your wine. So my favorite rosé wine pick is again Rinaldi's Pink Wine. I've seen this been called a white zinfandel before. I've seen it been called a rosé. This one is 7% alcohol. I find it to be a tiny bit less sweet than the other Moscato by Rinaldi. This one just tastes really good and it gives you more of that rosé vibe than the Moscato. It's super delicious. I get more fruity notes from this one. The other one I get more grape notes and apple notes whereas this one I get more raspberry and strawberry. I still get some grape and apple notes in here but it's just so so good. This one is so approachable if you're a beginner. Again it's another affordable one and I shop for all of my wines at Total Wine so I will link them all down below for you. Definitely go explore there. I find it a little bit less intimidating to look online and read all about the wine because if you go to Total Wine it'll tell you all of the kind of stats of the wine so where it's grown, who produced it, the vintage, how sweet it is, what style of wine it is, like is it a champagne, is it a rosé. So that's a great way for a beginner to kind of start diving into the wine world. So if there's any other wine resources that I've used to help me learn about wine I'll link those down below as well just to help you kind of get a better understanding as well but this is another one of my favorite wine picks. And while we're talking about rosé wines I just wanted to make a quick segue to talk about de-alcoholized wines. This could be another way that you enter into the wine arena in kind of a more approachable way. So de-alcoholized wines are wines where the alcohol is taken out. It is not a chemical process, it's normally through reverse osmosis or for boiling off the ethanol. So this one in particular I got from Total Wine. I don't find it to have a ton of flavor because I feel like just having a small percentage of alcohol in your wine, like five to seven percent, it's kind of like putting salt in a dish. So the salt is in a dish to kind of enhance the flavor and I feel like that's what the alcohol does in wine itself. You get more of those fruity or whatever notes that the wine says it has. You get more of those flavors when there's like a little bit more alcohol in it. So I've yet to find a de-alcoholized wine that I love but I did try this one and it was just okay. But if you want a very unintimidating way to try wine this could be a first step. So I also did want to mention though that all wines have some level of resveratrol. Now this is a phenol that is found in grapes and the fruits that are used to make the wine and resveratrol is a compound that has the antioxidant activity or the potential antioxidant activity. So when you see studies done where a glass of wine a day or whatever the recommendation is can improve heart health, it's typically through the action of resveratrol and that's also found in de-alcoholized wines. So you can still get the potential benefits of it if you're drinking the de-alcohol, oh my gosh it's so hard to say all these words, the de-alcoholized wine. Anything from your deep reds to the purest white of wines they still contain resveratrol it's just the different levels of the antioxidant. But speaking of reds I wanted to talk about my favorite red wine. This is actually a red sparkling wine. I've talked about it multiple times on my channel so if you're not new here you've already heard me talk about this but if you are new here this is Santro Sola's Bracado de Aqui. It is a sparkling red wine. This one is my favorite brand of the sparkling red wine. To me red wine is typically very tannic, very just full-bodied and just too much for my palate. I can't it's too much for me unless I'm cooking with it. But this one I feel like is lightened because it is both sparkling and it is on the sweeter side. So there's notes of raspberry and strawberry and cream in this. It is so delicious and creamy. I highly recommend it. This would make an amazing gift and it's super super affordable. I think it's only $15 maybe even less for per bottle and also when you buy stuff in cases you can typically get a case discount. I think that's like 12 bottles per case. Just wanted to mention that this is also a DOCG wine. It is produced in Italy. So delicious. Rinaldin does make a Bracado. It is a little bit more expensive than this one. I want to say it's double the price but I think it's half as good. I think this one is better than Rinaldi's Bracado however I love Rinaldi for all the other wine choices. But all in all this red wine from Santro Sola is super fruity and complex but it's very palatable and accessible for the beginner. And now for a little bit I want to talk about champagne. So this is a Vouvray. I always feel like I'm saying that wrong. A Vouvray. This one's from France and right here this one has an AOP designation instead of the AOC. This one's a Demisec. A vintage of 2020. It's made from Chenin Blanc grapes and it has an alcohol content of 13.5 percent. When I'm going for a champagne I feel like champagnes are best for a beginner when mixed with like orange juice to make a mimosa or any kind of juice because of the alcohol content. So the 13.5 percent alcohol that's kind of a lot of alcohol content for me just for a sipping wine. So I like to mix this with either a sparkling water or a fruit juice to make sort of a mixed drink or mimosa situation because it's just very strong on my palate. It's very harsh even though it's a Demisec meaning it's one of the sweeter varieties of champagne it just still can't cut through the alcohol content enough for me personally. This one is nice. I love the notes to it even though the so this is the Clauses Champagne Vouvray AOP. Even though this one is a little too much for me I still wanted to recommend it just because it's super attainable. It's a really affordable price point and what I plan on doing with this is reducing the champagne down and baking with it. I think that would be super fun because I would enjoy it way more that way than just straight up drinking the bottle of champagne. And last but not least for my wines for beginners recommendations I want to talk about cooking wine. So when I first started off with wine I never thought to cook with it and since I started cooking with it my life has changed. I'm going to start off with something really simple that you've probably already had before and this is a Marsala. So this is Florio's Marsala Superior. This is a DOC designation because it's made in Italy. This was aged for 24 months in oak casks and this is the sweet Marsala. This brand also has a dry Marsala and what I do is I take this entire bottle and I just look up a random recipe for Marsala and I see how many servings of that recipe I need to make to use up the whole bottle and then in one go I just make a ginormous batch of Marsala sauce that I can use in different dishes for however long it takes me to get through it. And I store my Marsala sauce in the fridge and I store it in kind of single serving containers that way I can pull it out as I need it depending on how many dishes I'm trying to make. So I just love making my own Marsala sauce and just for reference this is a sweet wine however it has 18% alcohol and typically with wines like this this is considered a fortified wine so alcohol has been added to it to give it a higher alcohol concentration. This happens in some dessert wines and in fortified wines like this so don't let that scare you because when you're making the Marsala sauce it's going to cook out the ethanol or the alcohol and you're not going to be tasting that bite of alcohol like you would if you just straight up tried this. I did try this by itself and whoa it was intense. I don't recommend drinking it but I highly recommend cooking with it. It is so good. I have two other cooking wine recommendations so I'll start with this Chardonnay from Golden. I get this from Whole Foods and I typically buy it two at a time when it's on sale. It's only like $16 not on sale so it's at a really good price point. It does have a vintage and it also has the specific area in California where it's grown. This was grown in Monterey County and it even says the winery where this was produced and so when you have a wine that says the winery it is produced at you know you're getting a better quality wine typically. So sometimes you'll just see wines that have no vintage no area where it was grown or it could just say it was grown in California and so those grapes can come from literally anywhere in California and can be all blended together. But this one specifically is a Chardonnay. I find Chardonnays to be buttery and crisp and perfect for simple sauces that you can make with chicken or pastas. I do this thing where I add Chardonnay, some lemon juice, a little bit of butter, olive oil, and some basil and maybe a little bit of chicken stock if I need to thin it out and it makes a really really light and delicious lemony crisp sauce to go over. I actually use it for like sun-dried tomato and goat cheese ravioli and it's really really good. Highly recommend that but I just wanted to mention if you do happen to pick up a wine and you're not a fan of it try cooking with it because everybody always says don't cook with wine that you wouldn't drink. However mine's been the exact opposite. I've thoroughly enjoyed cooking with wine that I wouldn't just straight up drink. And last but not least I wanted to mention a wine that I picked up from Trader Joe's. It was super affordable. It was under $10. I want to say it was like $5. It was an organic wine with no sulfates from California, vintage of 2018. It has an alcohol content of 12.5% and I love red wines to dump into dishes that are tomato based. So I'll pour it into chilies or pasta sauces. Anything kind of warm and cozy that I'm making I love to dump in a little red wine. You could dump it into pot roast anything. Super delicious and it's another one of those wines that I wouldn't typically drink on its own but I do occasionally give it a little taste to make sure that the wine hasn't oxidized and turn it to vinegar. So the alcohol and wine can oxidize and turn into vinegar if you didn't know. That is how vinegar is actually made. So I give it a little taste test here and there as I'm keeping it in my fridge and before I cook with it just to make sure I'm not pouring straight up vinegar into my dishes. We have reached the end. I have gone through all of my favorite wines for beginners. These are my top picks. I'm going to list them all down below for you just so it's a little bit helpful and again I'll link any resources that I have used along the way so you also can learn what I learned about wine. I just wanted to say thank you for watching all the way to the end if you did. I really really appreciate it. If you're not subscribed please feel free to subscribe and like this video. It really helps my channel out and stay tuned for next week. I'm going to be doing my monthly favorites for all categories of life from January and February. I hope you guys enjoyed this and I will see you in the next one. Bye!