Wine Shop

The Wine Shop is a shop in Drake Town where you can buy all types of wine.

Raisin wine
In ancient Carthage a sweet wine called passum was made from air-dried grapes, and across the Malta Channel from the site of Carthage, similar wines are still made called Moscato Passito di Pantelleria. Such wines were described by the Romans, and northern Italy is home to a number of 'passito' wines, where the grapes are dried on straw, on racks, or hung from the rafters. These wines include Vin Santo (into which almond biscuits ('cantucci') are traditionally dunked), Sciachetrà, Recioto di Soave (drunk with the local version of panettone) and the sweet red Recioto della Valpolicella (which stands up to chocolate better than most wine). Across the Alps, the French make 'straw wine' (vin de paille) in the Jura, Rhone and Alsace, the Spanish start off making a raisin wine with Pedro Ximénez before fortifying it, the Cypriots have their ancient Commandaria and there have been recent experiments with the style in South Africa and the USA.

Ice wine
Most wine laws require temperatures below at least −7 °C (19 °F) before the grapes for ice wine can be picked. At such temperatures, some of the water in the grapes freezes out, but the sugars and other solids remain dissolved in the remaining juice. If the grapes are pressed whilst frozen a very concentrated must can result, which needs special yeast and a long time to ferment. The resulting wines are very sweet but with lots of balancing acidity. The minuscule yields mean that they tend to be very expensive. The most famous ice wines are German Eiswein and Canadian ice wine, but apart from these, ice wine is also made in the United States, Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Australia, France, and New Zealand in smaller quantity.

Noble rot wine
Some of the most famous dessert wines of them all, such as Château d'Yquem of Sauternes and Tokaji Aszú of Tokaj-Hegyalja in Hungary, are made from mouldy grapes. But not just any mould - Botrytis cinerea sucks water out of the grape whilst imparting new flavours of honey and apricot to the future wine. However, it may also release metabolites that can retard fermentation - in fact Recioto della Valpolicella from Italy relies on a premature stop to fermentation to keep it sweet, otherwise it becomes the dry wine Amarone.

Unfortunately the fungus is very fussy about the conditions required for such 'noble rot', if it is too damp the same fungus causes the destructive 'grey rot'. So vignerons walk a fine line between maximising the amount of noble rot and losing the whole crop to grey rot. Typically noble rot forms best in conditions where morning mist from a nearby lake or the sea gets burnt off during the day by hot sun. The wait for noble rot to form is the reason why noble rot wines are usually late-harvested. No doubt the first noble rot wines were created by accident - both the Hungarians and the Germans have similar stories of how the harvest was delayed for some reason, but the mouldy grapes were vinified anyway and then found to be delicious. Given that propensity to noble rot was a factor in Hungarian vineyard demarcations some 50 years before a messenger was supposedly mugged on his way to Schloss Johannisberg in Germany, the Hungarians probably have a better case. Noble rot is responsible for many of the greatest dessert wines, not just Tokaji, Sauternes and Recioto, but the Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese of the German wine classification, Romanian Grasă de Cotnari, French Monbazillac, Austrian Ausbruch and several wines from the New World.