Fortified wine

We have walked through sparkling wine, white wine and red wine (still wines) and now it’s time to visit fortified wine. I am going to lump them all together here and that pains me a little because they are all so different but for now we’ll take a look at the general process and as we progress along will get into the details of all of these wines.

When talking about fortified wines, I generally think of sherry, port, madeira, and fortified muscats. Despite their differences, they do have a commonality and that is that they start as a still wine and the fermentation is stopped by adding a high alcohol spirit of some sort. Remember when making wine the yeast “eats up” all of the sugar in the wine fermenting it to dryness. What the fortification process does is kill the yeast and when the yeast dies it no longer consumes the sugar, leaving a sweet wine.

Anyone involved in the production of these wines would cringe at this simplistic and slightly inaccurate, or rather, incomplete explanation because there are styles of sherry and madeira that are not sweet, so I’m going to share a little more information but save the rest for a future detailed write up. Sherry, generally, comes from the Jerez region is southern Spain. Port comes from northern Portugal and Madeira is made on the island of Madeira, Portugal. Fortified muscats are best known as coming from the Southern Rhone region, but are also made in Australia.