Sweet wines, your pairing with desserts!

With so many different types of sweet wines that you can pair up with a dessert, or sip on its own after dinner. Sweet wines range from the fresh and fruity to the syrupy and sticky - so how do you choose the right wine? The fresher, sweet styles are made from grapes that have been left on the vine for longer to ripen to higher sugar levels. You may be familiar with the word spatlese on such wines. It's German for 'late-harvested'. These wines are as sweet as really ripe, fresh fruit and go well with something like a juicy peach.

If the grapes are left on the vine for a little longer, they can be infected by a kind of mould (oh, is that what it is???) called botrytis, or 'noble rot', which shrivels the berries and makes for a sweeter wine. The two most common grape varieties are riesling and semillon. Botrytis-affected riesling tends to be very sweet but zesty, while Botrytis semillon are richer, softer and fuller-flavoured. The sweetest wines of all are the fortifieds- muscat, tokay and port - with the word 'liqueur' on the label.

So, now that you know all this you can enjoy your wine with dessert too! Hooray.

(Source: au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/better-homes-gardens)