Who It's For: Dessert wine fans, Jane Austen defenders, and anyone who has quietly held a soft spot for sweet wines they are tired of apologizing for.
Sweet wine occupies a strange place in modern drinking. Dessert menus have shrunk. Dinner parties end faster. The category has quietly retreated to the back of most wine lists. The problem with all of that is that some of the greatest and rarest wines ever made are sweet, and the stories behind them are frankly better than anything on the dry side of the shelf.
Take Rutherglen in northeast Australia. The old-timers there say that when the fermenting Muscat starts to smell like plum pudding, they know it is time to fortify. The resulting wine tastes exactly like you would imagine. Or take Vin de Constance from the Cape, which Napoleon reportedly drank daily in exile on St. Helena, which Jane Austen name-checked in Sense and Sensibility for its “healing powers on a disappointed heart,” and which disappeared for a century after phylloxera before being resurrected by producers determined not to let it stay lost. These are not footnotes. These are wines that moved through empires and ended up in novels.
We pour through a lineup of the great and rare sweet wines of the world, each one tied to its own story. Expect something closer to a reading from a very good book than a standard dessert flight.