Wine and Dessert wine

I've recently started in on making wine, with a Cabernet Sauvignon; right now its sitting at a specific gravity of .998. I'm really excited about making wine, as I've recently been on a trend of trying to make as much as I can (food, beer, wine, crafts, etc) from scratch.

Yesterday Megan and I had a bottle of a Gewürztaminer-Eiswein, a dessert wine. Most dessert wines are slightly higher in alcohol than their mainstream counterparts. Also, usually the prefix Eis- (German for ice) means a form of freeze distillation where you chill your fermented beverage, and remove the ice (the water will freeze out of solution), leaving a higher percentage of alcohol and more intense flavors left in the wine/beer.

This particular Eiswein introduced me to a new concept in the world of Eis-. It was 7% ABV and very sweet. My guess is that they started fermentation in the Gewürztaminer, taking periodic Brix measurements, and at a certain point (with quite a bit of fermentation still left),  chilled the wine to kill the yeast. This would leave a slightly alcoholic wine, with quite a bit of fermentable sugars left over, making it very sweet.

I may have to try this sometime, it was quite delicious.

Also on my list of wines to make is a port, as I am a big fan of them. Port wines (Vinho de Porto) are from Portugal, and can be described as "fortified wines." A particular grape harvest is used in two ways:

1) The grapes are made into a wine, and then distilled into a grape brandy (note that this is always done with the same grapes)

2) A second wine is made, and as above with the Eiswein, readings are made, and a a certain sugar content, the grape brandy is added. The high alcohol content in the brandy is too much for the yeast, so it stops fermentation at that point. The wine can be sweeter or drier depending on when this step occurs.

This is a simplistic description of the making of port wine, I'll get more into it as I get closer to making my own, specifically the differences between Tawny ports and Ruby ports, late bottle vintages and much much more.