Vin Santo del Chianti DOC

It's a match made in heaven: The sacred wine Vin Santo and deliciously crunchy cantuccini. The famous almond cookies from Prato have long since conquered Swiss sweet tooth. Traditionally, cantuccini should be enjoyed with Vin Santo, the wonderful Italian sweet wine. Which brings us right into a hotly debated wine section. Because sweet wines, or dessert wines, form a broad field of activity, loved dearly by some and spurned coldly by others. The spectrum of sweet wines is very broad and differentiates itself above all in its method of production. Either the characteristic sweetness results from a natural concentration of fructose in the grapes or the wine is fortified, i.e. enriched with alcohol. What both have in common is the pronounced residual sweetness. This occurs when the fermentation process is interrupted before all the sugar has been converted into alcohol by the yeast. This can be because the yeast dies due to a high alcohol content or because the winemaker stops fermentation. A naturally high concentration in grapes is achieved in a number of ways and varies in different growing regions. In Germany, one often finds noble sweet wines made from must of grapes with noble mold. The fungus perforates the skin of the berries so that the water evaporates and the berries dry out on the vine. For the famous ice wine, the grapes are left to freeze on the vine and harvested at a minimum of -7 °C in a frozen state and immediately pressed. And then there is also the method of drying the harvested grapes, called passito in Italy. This is how the popular Vin Santo is made, from dried, partially raisined grapes of the white grape varieties Trebbiano and Malvasia, in the rosé version enriched with Sangiovese. The grapes are dried in the attic until Christmas or even longer, and the wine is pressed - depending on the sugar concentration achieved - between December and Easter. After that, the wine goes into oak barrels and is stored in the vinsantaia, a room under the roof. The drinkable wine probably got its name from its function as an ecclesiastical mass wine. But perhaps also because it tastes like a heavenly temptation. With its famous companion Cantuccini, the Vin Santo enters into a perfect symbiosis and is virtually predestined to be given as a gift. As a souvenir or as a small gift to yourself.