Enjoying a Sweet Wine Tasting

As a wine consultant with WineShop At Home, I lead wine tastings in people’s homes where I introduce people to WineShop At Home’s wines and give them the opportunity to try before they buy. My tasting host today is a sweet wine lover. So I did a sweet wine tasting, featuring six of our sweetest wines:

• Petit Cadeau Semi-Seco Sparkling
• Fleur Bleu White Bouquet
• Gemme Cellars Gewurztraminer
• Dusk Black Muscat
• Table Red
• Milano Cellars Dolcetto

Getting the Most out of a Sweet Wine Tasting

Personally, I’m a big, bad red wine fan. My favorite wine is Cabernet, and I love all the big, bad reds, including Zinfandel, Syrah, Nebbiolo and many more.

So you might wonder how I do at a sweet wine tasting. Truth be told, I love it. And here’s why.

I believe there’s a time and place for every wine. Unless you truly dislike a particular type of wine, it’s fun to figure out special occasions for these wines that you wouldn’t normally pick.

• Hot summer day: Perhaps you realize that a particular sweet wine would be great on your hot summer patio at 4:00 in the afternoon with a good book and some light munchies.
• Dessert: Perhaps you see that another sweet wine would be the perfect complement to a dessert you’ve been working on.
• Spicy dishes: Perhaps another sweet wine softens the spiciness of a spicy Chinese dish.
• Blue cheese: Savory/sweet combinations can be a real treat. In this case, I had people try the Black Muscat on its own and the blue cheese on its own. I then had them try them together. Everybody got very excited about how the tastes changed.
• Focused sweetness: When you do a tasting that has some dry and some sweet tastings, you have a hard time adjusting to the changes. When you do all sweet (or all dry), you can have fun getting seriously into that particular style of wine.

Sweet vs. Cheap Wine

Many people associate cheap wine with sweet wine – and vice versa. When you taste a high quality sweet wine, you’re not tasting plonk. A high quality sweet wine isn’t cloyingly sweet. That really makes a difference.

While a 100% sweet wine tasting may be a bit extreme for you, I’d be happy to do a largely sweet wine tasting for you. I can all but guarantee that everybody will have a good time.

If you’d like to learn more about hosting a wine tasting, whether it be sweet, dry or somewhere in between, please visit my wine tasting page.

Cheers!