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Dessert Wines
Port
is from Portugal.
Port-style wines (which can be absolutely
delicious in their own right) are from somewhere that
isn't Portugal. Port comes in several different styles:
Ruby--This is the simplest,
and least expensive, style. It is often quite tasty, but
stick with the major names which will be listed below.
Ruby Port is a dark purplish color, quite sweet, with
plummy, raisiny flavors.
Tawny--I would avoid
this. It is generally a mixture of the worst of the Ruby
lots with a perversion of nature called White Port. Try it
if you must, but it cannot hold a candle to real
aged Tawny.
Aged Tawny--This is
the real thing in Tawny Port. These are Ports which have
spent a long time in wooden barrels. They are
blends of the produce of several years harvests, so the
ages you see listed on the bottles (10-year, 20-year,
30-year, 40-year) are averages or approximations
of the age of the blend (some parts of the blend being
younger and some being much older than the listed age on
the label). These ports have a wonderful nutty character
and an orange-brown/golden/brown color acquired during the
long wood aging. These are some of the best dessert wines
in the world. These wines will run from about $20 for the
10-year-old to about $100 for the 40-year-old.
Vintage Character--This
is basically a marketing gimmick designed to associate
slightly above-average Ruby Ports with the reputation of
the much greater Vintage Ports. These are good Ports, and
well worth the $10-$15 per bottle, but do not confuse them
with Vintage Ports.
Late-Bottled Vintage--These
are wines from a single year's vintage which have been
wood-aged for four to six years before bottling. There is
a trick to watch out for when buying one of these wines.
There are two styles: one, called "traditional" LBV,
collects a sediment at the bottom of the bottle, and so
must be decanted and filtered (through a coffee filter or
a layer of cheesecloth) before drinking. These are very
good quality wines (though not so good as Vintage Ports),
and well worth the $18-$25 you might pay for them. The
second, more common, style does not collect this sediment,
making it easier to pour and serve straight from the
bottle (this is the sort you will generally find in
restaurants). These wines, however, are generally of a
lower quality than the "traditional" LBVs, often no better
than a Ruby or Vintage Character Port, but the price is
the same as the "traditional" LBV. Buyer Beware.
Vintage Port--This is
the Emperor of Port and the King of Dessert wines. Vintage
Port is wine from a single year, blended and bottled after
two to three years of wood-aging. Thus, a 1994 vintage
(the most recently released vintage and one of the hottest
in years) is released in the last half of 1996. These
wines are nowhere near ready to drink when they are
released. Hold on to them for at least 10, and preferably
15-25 years after their vintage dates. If you wait (or are
lucky enough to drink from a bottle for which someone else
has waited), you will taste the best the known universe
has to offer: a sweet, yet richly smooth, warm, and
perfumed glass of wine overflowing with plummy, raisiny
flavors with hints of chocolate and spice. On release,
these wines run from $30-$40, but they become much more
expensive as the years go by. A 1977 Warre is running
about $100, while a 1970 Taylor is well over $100. Get
them young and wait--you'll thank yourself later.
The producers to watch for in Port include:
Taylor Fladgate
Fonseca
Graham
Warre
Croft
Dow
Sandeman
Quinto do Noval
Cockburn
If you are curious to try some
Port-style wines, try the Yalumba Clocktower
Port (about $10), or the Yalumba Galway Pipe Port
(about $20) from Australia. Ficklin, a California
winery, produces a Port-style wine which is also a good
drink (about $11). Avoid like the
plague anything with a screwtop.
Sherries
(which come from the Xerez region of Spain--anything
not from Spain is not true Sherry) are the bargains of the
dessert wine world. A top quality Cream Sherry from
a producer such as Emilio Lustau will run about
$12-$20. Sherries, of course, also come in non-dessert
forms; Fino is pale and bone-dry, and makes an
excellent accompaniment to seafood; Oloroso is dark
like Cream (Cream sherries are blends of Oloroso
and extremely sweet Pedro Ximinez [pronounced
him-in-ez] sherries), but it is dry and tangy and goes
wonderfully with a rich soup or even a roast of beef. All
of these wines are relatively inexpensive and well worth
some experimentation. Again,
avoid screwtops.
Sauternes
and Barsac
are French wines made from Semillon, Sauvignon
Blanc, and Muscadelle grapes. These wines are
of a rich golden color and have a surprisingly rich
honeyed sweetness. They acquire these characteristics in
large part due to something called noble rot (no, you're
not drinking something that should have gone out with
those green beans from Thanksgiving!). Noble rot is caused
by a fungus called Botrytis; this fungus feeds on
the water in the grapes, leaving behind the sugar. This
concentrates both the flavors and the sweetness of the
now-shriveled grapes, and the wine made from these grapes
is of a much more concentrated flavor than it could have
been without the friendly fungus. Sauternes and Barsac
wines are named after the region in which they are grown;
as a general rule, Sauternes wines are heavier and Barsac
wines are a little lighter. Beware, though, these wines
are expensive. A good quality wine from either of these
regions will run a minimum of $25-$35. The higher end of
the spectrum will run into the hundreds of dollars. The
most famous Sauternes is something called Yquem (by
Chateau Yquem); it is the kind of wine that is
generally kept behind bars in a display case, in case some
well-read but under-funded wine-lover were to decide to
grab it and make a dash! A recent Yquem will go for about
$200-$250.
American
late-harvest wines are much less expensive, but
the best of them are still quite wonderful. The Bonny
Doon winery in California makes a wine it calls
Muscat Canelli Vin de Glaciere (wine of the icebox,
essentially) which achieves the concentration levels of
noble rot by freezing the grapes, then pressing them
immediately so that only the sugary liquid--which has a
lower freezing point than water--will run from the press).
This wine sells for about $15 for a half bottle (375ml).
It is an amazingly concentrated nectar-like wine. Try it.
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