Grand Vin Wine Merchants UK | Blog

Sauternes battles the fate of all truly fine sweet wines. Our age, unlike those that went before, does not prize sweetness in wine. We have full, cheap access to sugar. And then there is the association of sweet wines with unsophisticated palates. Yet ‘Sweet’ is an entirely inadequate term for the scintillating, lush tension of the best examples. Sugar, acidity, extract and the mysterious sour, perfumed freshness of botrytis create wines of captivating textures, aromas and longevity. Sweetness ceases to be the point. Yet these wines remain tethered to the dessert trolley. I adore sweet wines and drink them with anything. They are just so improbable. I love these expressions of human ingenuity intersecting with nature. This applies not just to botrytised wines, of which Sauternes is the most famous but far from only example. The Recioto wines of Italy and Ice Wines of Germany are similarly weird but brilliant. Rotten grapes. Shrivelled grapes. Frozen grapes. You couldn’t make t...