A change of palate

Minnesotans always have been sweet on sugary wines, even if they wouldn't admit it. Most of the stuff at the state's ever-improving wineries has a sweet edge, and popular brands such as Kendall-Jackson Vintners' Reserve Chardonnay contain semi-subtle jolts of residual sugar. And then there's white zin.

But lately locals are unabashedly flocking to the sweet stuff, as sales of riesling, gewürztraminer and especially moscato have seen a huge uptick hereabouts.

"The palate that had gone [to dry wine] has found a new appreciation for sweet wines like moscato d'Asti," said Tom Lloyd, manager of the Big Top store in Minnetonka. "And you've got some people who stayed with the sweet but have discovered California moscato, and the availability of that is amazing.

"The jug wine era has come to an end, but that doesn't mean 'jug wines' are gone."

Bottom line: Advancements in both grape growing and winemaking have meant much better fermented grape juice -- especially on the sweet side. "The science gets better every day," said Lloyd.

Case in point: Müller-Thurgau. The primary grape in all that lamentable liebfraumilch of the 1970s (think Blue Nun), it now finds lovely expression in varietal bottlings from Oregon's Anne Amie and Italy's La Vis Dipinti and Alois Lageder.

These wines have varying degrees of sweetness and minerality, which tend to come in waves on the palate, but are uniformly much cleaner and more substantive than their insipid forebears.

The same holds for Minnesota whites. The U of M-developed La Crescent grape has that "medium-dry" thing down pat, from wineries such as Saint Croix and Woodland Hill. WineHaven in Chisago City makes a spectacular ice wine, Slippery Slope, largely from the same grape.

But white wines are not the sole domain of the sweet stuff. An $11 effervescent red from Italy called "La Passione" is proving very popular.

"It's gotten a really great reception," said Laurie Crow, owner of Sinful Wine & Spirits in Bloomington. "But what I'm really noticing is more people asking for moscatos."

In these bargain-hunting times, it's little wonder that consumers are lapping up moscatos from Barefoot and Woodbridge. They're tasty, ever so smooth and have the numbers on their side: $7 to $8 and 9 to 10 percent alcohol.

While these make dandy sipping or dessert wines, Crow said her customers "are expanding the way they enjoy it. They're starting to understand that there is a wonderful time and place for sweet wines, to realize how well it goes with spicy food, for example."

And German rieslings can be spectacular. Clean Slate ($11) makes a nice introduction; at the higher end, every riesling I ever had from A.J. Adam, Donnhoff, Müller-Catoir and Willi Schaefer has been yummy, often rising to nectar-of-the-gods status.

The loser in this movement, ironically, might be the wine that introduced most folks to sweet wines: white zinfandel. "Moscato is the new white zin," said Mike Dombrow of Lake Wine & Spirits in Minneapolis.

"There has been a stigma around sweet wine," said Big Top's Lloyd, "and white zinfandel had a lot to do with it. People come in and say, 'I'd like a really nice white zin,' and there's no such thing. It was an accident [in its origins]. It's a blush. But if you want a nice, well-made sweet wine, we've got something."

Increasingly, local customers are taking him and other merchants up on that proposition.