Approaching the grand finale of a delicious meal but too full for dessert? How about a sweet sip instead? Dessert wine, the sweetest category of wine, is the perfect way to add a touch of indulgence without the heaviness. Forget these sugar-free wines, sometimes only a dessert wine can satisfy your craving for sweets.

While many table wines lean toward the drier side, dessert wines shine as the sweet stars of the spectrum that deliver a distinctly different tasting experience compared to their dry counterparts. A wine is classified as sweet if it contains more than 30 grams of residual sugar per liter, but dessert wines often exceed this with significantly higher sugar levels than semi-sweet or semi-dry varieties. During the winemaking process, the natural sugars in grapes are converted into alcohol through fermentation, and the more sugars remain unconverted, the more sweetness the wine retains; giving dessert wines their luscious, sugary profile. Some popular grape varieties for these wines include Muscat, Sauternes, Gewürztraminer, and Riesling.

Dessert wines are typically enjoyed as after-meal drinks or paired with desserts. Their sweetness can be achieved through various winemaking techniques, such as stopping fermentation early to preserve sugar, allowing grapes to over-ripen for concentrated sweetness, freezing grapes, or using Botrytis cinerea (noble rot, a fungus) to enhance the sugar content. Other methods include fortifying the wine with spirits or other naturally sweet components like grape juice. In some cases, lower-quality production may artificially increase sweetness by adding sugar, a practice typically associated with less premium, bulk wines.