The complex journey from vine to wine.

One of the wonders of the wine world is of course the unique story behind the production of each grape variety and wine style, and the intense fascination this commands.

Dessert wines form one such distinctive category. I never imagined being quite so intrigued by what could almost be called ‘rotten grapes', but I am. Dessert wines are really worthy of inspection with their lengthy journey from grape to glass.

This month, our tasting panel highlighted a lesser-known but must-try producer Badsberg Cellar, that has an array of quality sweet wines, from an area that originally produced raisins.

The final product of dessert wines is intriguing: although the wines have very high residual sugar levels, well-made specimens are far from being cloying due to the high level of acidity achieved through a special process, and therefore retain balance.

Noble Late Harvests are one such example. The climate and conditions around them dictate a concentration of truly decadent flavour. Humidity and heat concentrate the sugar content, and the grapes are allowed to mature beyond the usual harvest-time period.

The mossy covering of noble-rot botrytis only appears through a combination of climatic circumstances that do not occur every year and shrivels the grapes on the vine. The sugars are concentrated further, but the now raisin-like grapes still retain a natural acidity giving a complex structure. From here, the picking and pressing is a highly intricate and delicate process to extract a gold, honey nectar.

Among the famous dessert wines of the world is Sauternes from France, while another alluring example is a German wine, Trockenbeerenauslese. The tongue will twist around more than just the name, but the literal meaning is simply, ‘selected harvest of dried berries'. It is a dessert wine of rarity and distinction, and here sweetness is a term definitely not used in the same vein as, say, a gluggable GlÜhwein.

The grapes travel a long distance to arrive in their inimitable form. Trockenbeerenauslese is the highest ranking in the Prädikatswein category of Austrian and German wine classifications.

Among these styles are Auslese, late-harvest wines; Beerenauslese, sweet, botryised wine made from individually selected grapes; Eiswein, another German speciality where the shrivelled grapes are kept even longer on the vine and allowed to freeze, further concentrating the flavours; and finally the Trockenbeerenauslese, individually selected shrivelled grapes with a very high sugar content.

A grape is subject to a process of continual transformation as it makes its way from harvest to the pressing process and fermentation. A little pressing and squeezing towards a metamorphosis, and then shaped into something new.

The noble-rot element, botrytis, something that seemed to be an insidious invasion, has been turned into something unusual and highly sought-after.

Wine producers the world over are on a continual quest to make the ultimate wine, and are therefore constantly on the lookout for that particular discovery which will create a unique positioning and following.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to demand attention in a crowded global wine market, and this has led to producers having to dream up even more artful ways of establishing a competitive edge. The most successful methods do appear to be steeped in unique natural circumstances that create an unusual product.

When delving into something delectable, it is clearly worth remembering that there is much more to this issue of ‘complexity' than first meets the eye.