Homemade sweet red wine

When it comes to fine dessert pours, you always remember your first wine. Tasting a rich Sauternes changes one's outlook on wine: Suddenly, "sweet wine" isn't just treacly plonk for the cola crowd, and the white Zin and "Mad Dog" misadventures of college times are mercifully flushed down the memory hole.

Despite its grandeur, dessert wine certainly doesn't have as big a tent as Cabernet, and it's probably just as well, since there is a lot less of it to go around. That is because serious sweet wines only get sweet when a winemaker uses extra rigor and care in crafting them.

How much wine constitutes a "unit" of alcohol?

In Canada, for example, grapes for ice wine must be picked in a pre-dawn frenzy to get them to the crushpad before they thaw out. Hungarian Tokaji Eszencia, the most concentrated wine in the world, has reached sugar levels of 900 grams per liter, and it takes years to ferment; it can take more than 100 pounds of grapes—enough for 50 bottles of table wine—to make one liter.

Other sweeties call for patience, too—there are Sherries, Ports and Madeiras that are aged 20, 50, even 100 years at th

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