KEY POINTS:
With a significant birthday looming, I'm more interested in the friends, the party, the music and the champagne than anything sweet to eat or drink. But since there is bound to be a cake it's a good time to consider sweet wines.
Call them what you will, but
there are plenty of stickies, dessert and botrytised wines made in New Zealand. Because of our variable climate we can expect relatively high humidity and rain in at least one wine region each year. And it is during the wettest of times that the most seductively sweet Kiwi wines are created because it is then that botrytis, or noble rot, infects grapes - if dry weather follows the wet.
In Latin, Botrytis cinerea means "grapes like ashes". Grapes infected with botrytis look ash-like because of the grey colour induced by the fungal spores. Noble rot might not look very romantic, but the way it shrivels grapes intensifies their flavour, changing the chemical composition of the resulting wine so it has a mouth-feel that we wine bores often describe as unctuous and oily - another way of saying it looks, tastes and feels more treacle-like than most sweet wines.
Botrytis can be induced by sprays too, but the real McCoy seems to taste better. Botrytised dessert wines are only one style in a delicious growing diversity of sweet wine styles made in New Zealand. Wines such as the excellent 2005 Forrest Estate Marlborough Late Harvest Riesling have always been readily available, (yes, some supermarkets sell it) but now New Zealand has its first vin santo, which means "holy wine".
Traditionally, this Italian dessert wine is from Tuscany, and made from Trebbiano and Malvasia grapes. Our version, Vin Alto Vin Santo, is made from chardonnay and pinot grigio but in the traditional style.
Another local curiosity is Trinity Hill Botrytis Viognier. Like the vin santo, it is produced in limited quantities, sells by the half bottle, is hard to come by, but is a refreshingly different sticky style.
In in a lighter style there is 2006 Daniel Schuster Hull Family Vineyard Waipara Late Harvest Riesling, which is all limes and lemons in flavour and great with puddings made from those ingredients.
Wine news
Coco Chanel said she drank bubbles only when she was either very happy or very sad.
That gives the rest of us the perfect excuse to open New Zealand's latest bubbly; 2004 Nobilo Methode Traditionnelle, $18 to $19. It's a blend of pinot noir and chardonnay grapes grown in Hawkes Bay and Gisborne, which underwent secondary fermentation in the bottle. Widely available.
