Sweet Wine Information

Do you remember your first wine?

Chances are it was a sweet wine like White Zinfandel, Reunite Lambrusco or the one I had in college, Boone?s Farm. I hope yours wasn't the lowly Thunderbird Wine with its fortified alcohol content. One time I tried it but didn't at all like the "unusual flavor." Check out this classic commercial:



This article about Sweet Wine and getting started in the world of drinking wine points out that today new drinkers of wine can get started with much better quality wines than past generations. The idea is for them to experiment when ready on even better quality when they prefer something more complex and interesting.

What I found interesting in the article was the author?s early experiences were so much like my own in my early adult years. One advantage I had over him was drinking my Italian grandfather?s homemade wine at the dinner table as a kid. Too bad I didn?t learn from it as I went on my own. At least the article?s author went onto a nice job in the New Zealand wine business.

So how do the sweet wines enter the picture for newcomers?

Perhaps younger drinkers raised on sodas, Hawaiian Punch and Kool-Aid simply prefer something on the sweet side because that is what they are used to drinking already. Not only that, the sweet wines have been intentionally developed and priced for a younger audience. Those wineries toss in an advertising campaign to position the sweet wines as cool. That process still works today.

Today the two buck chuck at Trader Joe?s is quite a decent place to start drinking a wine with a cork in the bottle. Not only that, the wine market is now so segmented that every time you add a dollar to the price of a bottle of wine; the quality usually goes up commensurately until you get to $20+ per bottle. By that time you are well on your own and enjoying some very nice wines with some great food.

The funny thing is sweet wines are enjoying better days because their quality is going up too. Wineries like Chateau St. Michele in Washington specialize in all manner of Riesling including a very recommendable sweet Riesling wine. What is that all about?

You see, sweet wines were never really were bad as a group. In fact, fine wine like those of Sauternes, France can be very sweet. In the summer of 2011 a bottle of Château d'Yquem, a sweet wine, sold for $120,000 USD breaking the world's record for the most expensive single bottle. It was 211 years old and sold at auction to obviously a very knowledgeable, and rich crowd.

Oh, so sweet wines are good? Yes.

Another example of a good sweet wine is a Ruby Port or just about any late harvest wine. Hunt around for them and you can find some gems to enjoy for a lot less than $75,000.