NEED A SWEET WINE

[Innkeeper]

Hi Zinful, and welcome to the Wine Board. You seem to be pointed in the right direction. There are two kinds of sweet, real sweet and perceived sweet. To keep things simple, let's just talk about real sweet, which your zin is not. Also, lets say sweet table wine is a little sweet, and dessert wine is very sweet. The best source in your neck of the woods for sweet table wine is riesling. So long as it doesn't say "dry" on the label, it will have some degree of sweetness. Buy two or three and see if she likes any of them, and then stick with that one. Most responsible riesling winemakers will print on the label how much residual sugar (RS) has been left in the wine, so you can pick them with different levels of sweetness.

Muscat is a little tougher. Most American muscat is dessert wine. The folks in Alsace make one that is nearly dry, and there is a slightly sweeter one from the Southern Rhone. There are a small handful of winemakers in California that try to make muscat in these styles. One is Easton in the Sierra Foothills.

[This message has been edited by Innkeeper (edited 10-09-2001).]