Madeira Wine Guide: The Bottle That Refuses to Die

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every rule you have learned about protecting wine, keep it cool, keep out air, drink it before it fades, gets gleefully broken by one bottle. Madeira is cooked on purpose, oxidised on purpose, and emerges essentially immortal: a wine that shrugs at heat, laughs at an open cork and can outlive everyone at the table. It completes the great fortified trio with Port and Sherry, and it might be the most useful of the three.

The Beginner's Guide to Sweet Wines: From Moscato to Tokaji

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you like sweet wine, the wine world has spent the last forty years quietly telling you that you should not. Modern wine culture worships dry wines. Sweet wines have become the category to apologise for. Beginners who genuinely enjoy a sweeter glass often hide it, picturing themselves as somehow unserious or unsophisticated.

The truth is the opposite. Sweet wine is the older, more historically prestigious category. For most of wine’s 5,000-year history, the most expensive and revered bottles were sweet. Roman emperors paid fortunes for Tokaji. Russian tsars treasured Hungarian dessert wines. Bordeaux’s Sauternes was a luxury commodity centuries before its dry red wines were taken seriously. The dismissal of sweet wine is a modern, mostly North American phenomenon, and it is starting to fade.

Dessert Wine on Sommo — AI Wine Scanner, WSET Prep & Wine Journal App

Madeira Wine Guide: The Bottle That Refuses to Die

The Beginner's Guide to Sweet Wines: From Moscato to Tokaji