Video Transcript: Exploring Dessert Wines
Written By: Anonymous on Tue, Sep 23rd 2008
Brian Freedman: Welcome to ClassicWines TV brought to you by classicwines.com, I am Brian Freedman. Now today we will be talking about dessert wines, although lets get this out of the way right off the bat, not all dessert wines are best enjoyed with desserts. Sometimes it becomes too much of a sweet thing, becomes a bad thing.
So let's actually start referring to them today as sweet wines. Now sometimes those have a bad reputation but the truth is sweet wines are what's more commonly known as dessert wines can be some of the longest lived, most interesting wines in the world. I am thinking here of Sauterne, I am thinking of things like Riesling Trockenbeeren Auslese which is the coolest word in the wine lexicon certainly.
So with this wine, what's port? Port is wine whose fermentation has been halted by the addition of grape brandy. Basically what this does, it stops the yeast cells from doing a little Macarena in there. And it pumps up the alcohol -- and you didn't think I was going to go macarena, did you? Me neither, anyhow it stops the yeast cells from doing their fermentation, pumps up the alcohol and it actually helps maintain a lot of that sweetness that you get from the unfermented grape juice, voila we have port.
Couple of different styles of port, that's for another episode at another time; we can spend an hour and a half just discussing this. What's most important here today is, tasting this port and then discussing what we can possibly pair this port with. So today we will be tasting the Sandeman Founders Reserve Porto and this doesn't have a vintage date on it. It's a blend of wines from all kinds of different years. So we are going to pour this here and you will notice on the back of the bottle, it says 20% alcohol by volume. Standard alcohol for a still red wine, lets say anywhere from 12 to 14 and a half percent.
So this is a big boy, this is not something you want to have first thing in the morning like perhaps your Processco or Champagne. So give this is a good swirl and a sniff and the alcohol jumps right out at you. But there is also this really interesting, that reminds me of like rasinettes. Remember those things, it reminds me a lot of rasinettes if you have ever had Craisins. It have like little chocolate fondue thing or caramel fondue, bucket on the side. If you dip the Craisins, the cranberry raisins in there, this is what you are getting here but with a lot of boost. Let's give it a taste.
Now this is something that we will be a great digestif. That'll settle the stomach after a big meal. I would love to pair this with either bitter chocolate, not too sweet, that milky chocolate might not be so great with it. I think this will be excellent with the blue cheese, the salt would really balance out some of that sweetness or a cigar; not that we are proponents of tobacco. But man a good cigar with a good port nothing better.
So don't shy away from those sweet wines, dessert wines whatever you call them, it's definitely worth the second look. We would like to thank the Wine School of Philadelphia for all their help with education and we would like to thank you for joining us. Everyone at classicwines.com, I am Brian Freedman. Cheers!
