White wine

White wine with fish... and much more!

As with our other wines, we carry white wine from all over the world and at all price levels.

However, our biggest asset within white wine is our own import from the Alsace house of Francois Lichtle, with whom we have been trading since 1993.

You are always welcome to drop by for a tasting and advice on the best wine for all occasions.

In the meantime, you can read a little more about white wine here. Then you'll have something to talk about the next time you enjoy a glass of white wine in good company.

How long have people been drinking white wine?

White wine has been around for at least 2500 years and maybe more. The founder of medicine himself, Hippocrates, born c. 460 BCE, used white wine as a medicine, indicating that even back then there were different types of white wine.

In ancient Rome, white wine was a prestige wine and the Romans produced a sweet and round white wine, similar to the Madeira of today. Gradually, however, they moved on to producing drier white wines.

Alsace wine has been popular for a long time - a very long time!

It was also the Romans who planted the first vines on the banks of the Rhine River to produce wine for the soldiers, as the river water was not always clean to drink. Today, wine from the Rhine region is still among the best in the world. We have a good selection of wines from Alsace at Walter.

How is white wine made?

Why is white wine white?

White wine is made from grape juice from white grape varieties or red/black grape varieties with white flesh. There are no skin parts in the fermentation process, which is the reason for the golden colour. This means that dark grapes, such as pinot noir, can easily produce white wine, which is often used in the production of Champagne and other sparkling wines.

What does sec, demi-sec, doux, moelleux mean?

These terms are all indications of the sweetness of the wine, with sec being the driest. A wine that is moelleux (soft) is only slightly less sweet than liqueur.

How does a white wine become dry?

The sweetness of white wine depends on how long the wine has been fermented. Dry white wines have been fermented for a long time, whereas sweet white wines are achieved by stopping the fermentation process before it is complete so that there is still sugar in the wine.

How much sugar is actually present in a white wine also depends on the ripeness of the grape at harvest time. The so-called vendanges tardives (late harvests) are wines where the grapes have been hanging on the vines for so long that they have suffered night frosts. These are always very sweet wines.

Other methods of increasing the sugar content in white wine are known as passerillage, which involves allowing the grapes themselves to increase their sugar concentration and lower the water content. This can be done either by removing leaves from the vine to give the grapes more sun, or by leaving the grapes flat on a surface, preferably hay, for a few days after harvest.

Finally, the addition of pourriture noble, a type of fungal growth, can ripen the grapes and make them sweeter.

Do you prefer your white wine dry or sweet?

Whatever the answer to this question, we are ready to advise you At Walter in Ebeltoft