Anything sweet is regarded with distaste or suspicion. But I love a luscious, rich, almost unctuous dessert wine, so long as it has sufficient acidity to balance the sweetness and keep the wine from being cloying. The balance is not easy to achieve. But when a wine has that yin and yang, it can be magical.
Good ones are rare and wondrous things, usually made in very small quantities.
There s just not enough to supply a mass market. Mother Nature is responsible for much of this rarity. One type of dessert wine, for example, starts with grapes that have been affected by Botrytis cinerea, commonly known as noble rot. Botrytis requires just the right conditions to get going, so some wineries may not produce a botrytis-affected sweet wine in every vintage. Botrytis shrivels the fruit and concentrates the sugar.