All the medallists from The Global Sweet Wine Masters 2025

The first Global Sweet Wine Masters did not disappoint, with judges marvelling over styles ranging from late harvest to vin santo. Patricia Stefanowicz MW reports.

The inaugural Global Sweet Wine Masters took place in late October among autumnal colours in a pastoral setting, a perfect venue in which to judge wines well-suited to the holidays.

The entries were limited to unfortified wines with at least 45g/l residual sugar, as is the EU and UK official classification. But that doesn’t mean that all the wines had a similar taste profile.

As anticipated, we were judging fine sweet wines, made by concentrating the sugar in the grapes before alcoholic fermentation. Generally speaking, there are four groups of very sweet wines: late harvest, botrytised, dried grape and ice wine or eiswein, and the judges were lucky enough to taste some excellent examples of each of these.

Late harvest wines vary considerably in levels of sweetness and are made by leaving the grapes to overripen on the vine, concentrating sugars. Our single sample this year, Chivite’s late harvest Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains from Navarra, was awarded a Gold.

There is a long history of botrytised wines in Sauternes and the central Loire Valley, in the Tokaj region of northeast Hungary and southeast Slovakia, and in almost all German wine regions.

Nowadays, these wines are also produced elsewhere in Europe and around the globe where conditions are suitable. De Bortoli’s Australian Noble One and Deen Botrytis Semillon were both awarded Golds. They were joined by Royal Tokaji’s Blue Label and Gold Label Tokajs, 5 puttonyos and 6 puttonyos respectively, which also earned Gold medals. Hermann Moser’s Austrian Welschriesling Trockenbeerenauslese garnered the Grand Master of this edition of the Global Sweet Wine Masters.

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In Germany, ice wine has been produced for a few centuries, though in small volumes and infrequently. It has only been since the 1980s that most of the finest-quality estates produce routinely. Very recently, this style has become very important in Canada and is produced mainly in Ontario, but also in Québec and Nova Scotia in the east, and British Columbia in the west.

The ice wines in this competition mostly hailed from Canada, and proved the worth of that country’s offerings.

Lakeview Wine Company Vidal and Pillitteri Estates Family Reserve Cabernet Franc both earned Gold medals.

Our final group was dried-grape wines. The production techniques have been known since antiquity, were perfected in classical Greece and Rome, and were used widely throughout Europe in the Middle Ages before becoming localised specialities. Our samples, both vin santo, were very high in residual sugar. Vin santo is Tuscany’s classic amber-coloured wine, made traditionally from Trebbiano and Malvasia, or occasionally from Sangiovese to produce Occhio di Pernice. The grapes are harvested and dried on straw mats under the rafters. Then the grapes are crushed between the end of November and end of March, depending on the desired level of residual sugar. After crushing, the must is fermented and then aged in small used barrels.

The wines we judged came from Avignonesi; they are carefully made, long-aged and unbelievably delicious. The Vin Santo and the Occhio di Pernice both achieved Masters and were a fantastic coda to our judging day.

The first Sweet Wine Masters exceeded all of the judges’ hopes and desires, and we rewarded the wines appropriately. We can hardly wait for next year.