Those looking for a sweeter wine than they’d normally drink often lean towards fortified wines. These wines tend to have a high alcohol content than their regular red and white equivalents, in addition to containing more sugars that lend them their unique tastes.
Many people call fortified wines either sweet or dessert wines. However, it’s important to make the distinction that while all fortified wines are dessert wines, not all dessert wines are fortified wines. Producers use all sorts of different techniques to add sugars into their wines, with fortification just being one of them.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at what goes into making a great Italian fortified wine, before examining some of the wines that we think would make great additions to your collection.
The Basic History
It all came about from a desire to preserve wine. You see, well before the days when we had corked wine bottles, refrigeration, and other technologies that allow us to preserve wines for longer, Italian wines were kept in casks.
Unfortunately, these casks didn’t offer the ait-right properties that you get with a modern bottle of wine. This meant that air had a habit of seeping in to them. Anybody who’s opened a bottle of wine and allowed it to oxidise for an extended period of time can tell you exactly what happens next. The wine ends up losing all of its qualities, turning into vinegar in the process.
This prevented people from transporting their wines over large distances. Exporting wine overseas was practically impossible, which actually helps to explain why so many regions produce different types of wine.
Still, winemakers wanted to sell more of their products, which meant they had to figure out how to get them to a wider audience. Later technologies helped with this, but a different solution was needed during the early days of the winemaking industry.
So, how did winemakers deal with this problem?
They started adding alcoholic spirits, typically brandy, to their wines. This increased the alcohol content, making the wine less likely to spoil during long journeys. However, it also increased the sugars in the wine, making them sweeter than they were before the spirits were added.
This process became known as fortification.
Now, not everybody was for fortification when it first became widely used. Many connoisseurs of the era understandable argued that the process damaged wines and prevented them from offering the natural tastes that customers expected. Others also claimed that fortification allowed bad winemakers to cover up the low quality of their wines with higher alcohol content and more sugars.
While this may have been the case in some instance, it’s also an unfair generalisation. Fortification offers winemakers the chance to lend a different flavour and feel to their wines. Moreover, it also means that they can expand their product offerings.
To put it simply, if fortification is a bad thing, it would no longer exist today. We have far more advanced preservative methods that help wines to maintain their texture and consistency over longer time periods. Fortification is no longer needed as a preservative technique.
Instead, it’s now used to add sweetness to a wine, turning it into a dessert wine in the process.
The General Process
As explained above, fortification involves adding a spirit to a wine. Typically, producers use a grape brandy, which helps to maintain the flavour of the wine while adding sugars and creating a higher alcohol content. However, others use neutral spirits in an effort to maintain the original taste of the wine as far as possible. Others are more experimental and will use spirits derived from other ingredients in an effort to lend their wines a unique flavour.
Many territories have rules in place to ensure winemakers use certain types of spirits when fortifying. For example, the United States only allows fortification using spirts derived from grapes. Other territories are more lenient.
When the spirits are added also plays a part in the fortification process. If they’re added before fermentation begins, you usually end up with a wine that has a high alcohol volume of about 20%. When it’s added later on, the alcohol volume and amount of sugar in the wine decreases.
This means that Italian winemakers have plenty of ways to experiment with fortification. In addition to trying different spirits, they can also adjust when they add the spirit to the wine.
Now that you know the general process, we’re sure that you want to give a few Italian fortified wines a try. Italy isn’t particularly well known for producing fortified wines, but there are a few that we think are worthy of a try.
This variation on Barolo may be the King of Fortified Wines in much the same way that Barolo is regarded by many as the King of Wines.
A fortified red wine that comes from the Piedmont region, the producers only use Nebbiolo grapes for the wine itself. The additional alcohol comes from spirit-infused herbs, making the production method somewhat unique.
The end result is a fortified wine with a 17% alcohol volume that’s also much sweeter than the classical Barolo that you may be accustomed to. However, the wine also has an interesting and slightly bitter aftertaste that reminds you where it came from immediately after overwhelming your palate with its sweetness.
We recommend combining this Italian fortified wine with a chocolate-based dessert for a perfect meal combination.
De Bartoli Vigna la Miccia Marsala Superiore Oro 0.5L
Emanating from Sicily, this fortified wine uses the Grillo grape to great effect. It has an 18% volume and offers an interesting spin on the classic Marsala fortified wine.
This wine emphasises its fruity notes to great effect, creating a gorgeously sweet and versatile wine that works extremely well with a wide variety of dessert dishes. In fact, this versatility extends to the point that it makes an excellent companion for several cheeses and even some sweeter fish dishes, such as scampi.
We recommend serving it slightly chilled. However, it’s also worth knowing that the wine has great ageing potential. Some choose to leave it in the bottle for as long as 15 years before cracking it open.
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