Cossart Gordon 5-Year-Old Medium Rich Bual Madeira

Nowadays wine drinkers seem to be interested in knowing how much sugar is in their wine. The LCBO helps put the sugar-curious at ease by making the information easily available on their website. But the average consumer probably doesn’t understand the role of sugar in wine.

Put simply, wine is made by fermenting the sugars in grapes and turning them into alcohol. Not all the sugar ferments, and what remains is called residual sugar. A bone dry Champagne will have as little as 2g/L, whereas some of the sweetest dessert wines could have as much as 420g/L.

But how sweet you perceive a wine to be depends as much on the acidity (also present in grapes) in the wine as it does on the sugar. If any wine lacks acidity, it will taste from flabby to cloying. However, the sweetest dessert wines, with sufficient acidity, will taste delicious.

If you are looking for a well-balanced dessert wine, consider a Portuguese Madeira made from the Bual grape. Bual, also called Malvasia, is naturally high in acid. It is made sweet by stopping the fermentation early (by adding brandy). In the hands of an expert winemaker, the resulting residual sugar is in perfect balance with the acid.

This delightful Bual from Cossart Gordon is complex with flavours of caramel, dried fruit, and spice. At 92g/L residual sugar, it makes a great after dinner sipper, with or without a cookie or two.