Dessert Wine - Noble Rot Wine

Noble Rot Wine

Some of the most famous dessert wines, such as Château d'Yquem of Sauternes and Tokaji Aszú of Tokaj-Hegyalja in Hungary, are made from mouldy grapes, but not just any mould - Botrytis cinerea sucks water out of the grape whilst imparting new flavours of honey and apricot to the future wine.

Unfortunately, the fungus is very fussy about the conditions required for such noble rot; if it is too damp, the same fungus causes the destructive grey rot. So, vignerons walk a fine line between maximising the amount of noble rot and losing the whole crop to grey rot. Typically, noble rot forms best in conditions where morning mist from a nearby lake or the sea gets burnt off during the day by hot sun. The wait for noble rot to form is the reason why noble rot wines are usually late-harvested.

No doubt the first noble rot wines were created by accident - both the Hungarians and the Germans have similar stories of how the harvest was delayed for some reason, but the mouldy grapes were vinified anyway, and then found to be delicious. Given that propensity to noble rot was a factor in Hungarian vineyard demarcations some 50 years before a messenger was supposedly mugged on his way to Schloss Johannisberg in Germany, the Hungarians probably have a better case.

Noble rot is responsible for many other dessert wines, including Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese of the German wine classification, Romanian Grasă de Cotnari, French Monbazillac, Austrian Ausbruch and other wines from all over the world.