A wine of straw

"Why all the grape drying?" "For something beautiful my boy!"

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In the world of fashion, there’s the premise that all styles come back around, something like every 20 years. This happens to be extremely good news as the skinny jean fad was killing me and I’ve been waiting to buy new “baggy” jeans for what seems like time inmemorable.

I have the distinct impression the world of fashion doesn’t apply when it comes to wines and more specifically when talking about sweet, dessert wines.

The absolute sweet zenith would probably be during the Goût Russe Champagne period which saw this treacly sparkling wine churned out in the 19th century with 300g/l of sugar for the Russian market. The fully-dessert wines of our current age are less than half that total and these sparkling wines are hopefully, something now left for the history books. But in losing that super sweet bubble format, it seems it set in motion events that have eventually taken the beautiful world of dessert wines down as well. Their general consumption has been in a freefall for something like the last 75 years now and I don’t particularly see them recovering their glory, especially in a time when both sugar and alcohol are a tag team of boogiemen.

Thus, if a winery is going to release a dessert wine today, especially one with a 20-year aging process, it’s clearly for their own curiosity/love of this oft-forgotten style of wine. This is something I would expect no less from than a winemaker such as Raül Bobet, the co-owner of the winery Ferrer-Bobet in the Priorat region of Catalunya, Spain.