Decoding the wine label: Spätlese

Semi-sweet Riesling, a type of wine falling out of style. It’s a shame, since these wines are perfect to pair with flavorful cuisines like Asian or Mexican, or simply drink as they come under the summer sun. The higher level of sugar left in the wine also means that the alcoholic fermentation was stopped before finishing, providing a wine with lower alcohol level and therefor easier grabbing a second glass of.

One of the most well-known countries for high quality sweet, and partly sweet, wines would be Germany. This is based on old climatic factors since it used to be a very cold country, sometimes struggling to fully ripen the grapes. Unripe grapes will result in a wine with a very high and sharp acidity. To solve this and make the wines more drinkable winemakers resorted to keeping part of the sugar in the wine to balance the acidity.

This style of wine has had quite a bad reputation as they once were made in large volumes from lesser grapes, resulting in a low quality product. Today, the production is very different and the semi-sweet wines are often very good and there are a number of styles to explore, often made from Germanys most iconic variety, Riesling.

In Germany wines are sorted into different quality levels depending on the sweetness of the grape must before fermentation. The riper the grapes, the better the quality was the device when the system was born. Even though that might not be true today, the system is still in place. The six different levels existing today are called prädikat, the first one being kabinett. Kabinett is the driest style, though in reality often off-dry or even sweeter. Great with dishes like ceviche with a slight chili heat to them. Next up is spätlese and auslese, both of which could technically be dry wines, but almost always end up as semi-sweet or sweet. The following three are all dessert style wines called beerenauslese, trockenbeerenauslese or eiswein depending of the production method. These are all great, but designed for dessert pairings only.

If you’ve tried these styles and would still prefer a style without sweetness, look for the term trocken on the label as it translates to dry in german. Despite the high quality of sweet wines Germany also produces some exceptional dry white wines, regarded as some of the best in the world. In other words, a country with many talents.