Special Wines for Valentine’s Day

We all know that Valentine’s Day is simply a corporate money grab, a holiday with one purpose: obliging you to buy cards, flowers, jewelry, chocolates and candies, wear red and order from overpriced menus on one of the busiest restaurant nights of the year.

In other words, it’s great fun. And since it’s one of the biggest days of the year for consuming sweets, I’d like to make a pitch this year for sweet wines.

It’s not an easy pitch to make. Good bottles are luscious, nuanced and captivating. But they are arduous and risky to produce, which means they are relatively expensive. And consumers today find it difficult to incorporate sweet wines — once prized, much sought-after styles — into hectic, health-conscious routines.

I understand this. The era of the after-dinner bottle of port or Sauternes is long over. Classic styles of sweet wine have been unfashionable for decades. And yet, at the right moment, they can be so gloriously delicious.

Valentine’s Day could be the right moment. The focus is desserts and candies, so why not add to the bounty? Rather than try to force uncomfortable pairings of chocolates, bonbons and other desserts with red wine, why not a sweet wine that can truly enhance the pleasure?

While it may seem counterintuitive, sweet wines can go with far more than desserts. Last year I drank Sauternes with oysters on the half shell and boudin noir and thoroughly enjoyed the combinations. Why? Because good sweet wines are not merely sweet. They are beautifully balanced, lively and refreshing, which makes them, if not exactly versatile, less inflexible than you might think. Few wines will go better with strong cheeses.

I went shopping at New York stores for sweet wines recently and found 10 that I highly recommend. It wasn’t easy — the selection has dwindled over the years. But these are all worth checking out.

You may not be able to find each of them, but you will find options that mirror these pleasures. Given the fragmented distribution of wine in the United States and the relative scarcity of sweet wine, it’s hard to find specific bottles.

Recently, I had two wines that I wanted to include on this list because I had enjoyed them not long before: Broc Cellars Mockvin du Broc Rosé 2015, its interpretation of Macvin, a fortified wine of the Jura, and Château Doisy-Védrines Sauternes 2018, an excellent, moderately priced bottle (relative to other Sauternes).

But Broc no longer makes its Mockvin (it instead now makes a version of Angelica, the historic California wine made with the mission grape), and the Doisy-Védrines simply was not to be found. Snap it up if you see it.

One reason many sweet wines are expensive is because they are risky to produce. Sauternes, the Hungarian sweet wine Tokaji aszu and others are at their best when affected by botrytis cinerea, or noble rot, a benevolent fungus that concentrates and amplifies the sweetness and complexity. But botrytis depends on particular weather conditions that are impossible to control and can easily turn catastrophic, ruining a harvest rather than enhancing it.

They are also labor intensive, as harvests can often be bunch by bunch over a prolonged time. Most of the bottles on this list are not even full size, which means the cost per glass is even higher.

You probably don’t buy a box of chocolates and flowers every day, and you won’t often drink sweet wine, either. But on a special occasion, why not? Added bonus: These wines look gorgeous by candlelight.

Here are the 10 bottles in ascending order of price.