WITHOUT RESERVATIONS

Red only

Red dessert wines are an underappreciated bunch, their sanguinous richness eclipsed by the golden, honeyed style of their more widely noticed white cousins, the Sauternes and semillons and muscats. If people want something dark and red in their postprandial glass, something to match up with chocolate, they often turn to port, and there are plenty of options here, some from Portugal, others from European sources that cannot, by European Union rules, use the word port (a good example is the fortified red wine from the Banyuls region of France), still others from such California producers as Fetzer, Guenoc, Bogle, Ross Valley, and Bonny Doon.

Port is lovely, of course, but there are other ways of getting the job done. In Italy's Veneto, winemakers use a technique called passito, in which the grapes are sun-dried before the crush to increase their sugar levels and intensify their flavor. The resulting wine style is called recioto, and its most common exemplars are white dessert wines from Soave and dry red ones from Valpolicella. But ... why not a sweet red wine? Someone at Bonny Doon must have asked this question, because the winery has produced an answer: a recioto of Barbera, a rich, sweet-but-not-too-sweet red dessert wine made from domestically grown Barbera, a tony grape native to Italy's Piemonte.

The wine has enough sweetness to get along with many desserts of the chocolate and berry varieties, though not, perhaps, a lemon tart or something similarly acidic. At the same time, it isn't cloying and, lightly chilled, makes an appealing aperitif, like a good sherry but with deep notes of grape, cherry, and raspberry.

And speaking of the last, and for those who will drink port and only port: Bonny Doon is also offering a portlike wine — Bouteille Call is the cleverly punny name — that's been spiked with a bit of framboise (the raspberry liqueur) for that extra frisson of fruitiness. The other ingredient is grape spirits, which is of interest not only because of when it's added (as part of the fermentation or to stop it) but also because it is not brandy, as I long and mistakenly believed. It is, instead, a superdistillate of brandy. Ordinary, drinkable brandy (including my beloved Calvados, which many would consider undrinkable) is 40 percent alcohol, or 80 proof. The grape distillate used to make port is 190 proof, or 95 percent alcohol. That's more than enough to leave most eyes red and bleary.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com