Like many of us, William's love of the grape began with a sip of a sweet wine, in his case a thimble-full of late-harvest Gewurtztraminer offered by his mother to a curious 12-year-old. Even all these years later, he still claims to remember that sense of sticking one's head into an armful of lilies, stunned that such a small glass could pack such a large wallop.
It is no surprise that many wine drinkers are first attracted to dessert wines, as they offer comforting sweetness together with intriguing floral notes for the whites, and interesting chocolate tones for the reds.
The next step for many people is to move from dessert wines to slightly drier but still wonderfully perfumed dry whites, such as Gewurtztraminer and Riesling, and then into a classic Chardonnay phase. From there, many jump to red wine, some with such a fervor that they eschew white wines altogether for many years, or even decades.