I’ll be writing quite a lot in the next few days about wine: the harvest is almost upon us, a lot of interesting things came out of my three days at Vinea, which is Switzerland’s largest wine festival, the Mondial du Pinot Noir competition winners were announced.

In addition, I spent six hours dining in one of Switzerland’s best restaurants, rubbing elbows with two producers of top St Emilion wines, and that begs for a few words about what was in the glass, what was on the plate and how the conversation went.

In short, no shortage of wine talk.

But for now, at the end of a day of checking and finetuning our new GenevaLunch web site, I have the energy to write about only one thing: this weekend, at Vinea, I fell in love with sweet wines. For years, I thought they were best avoided, based on bad memories of Boone’s Farm apple wine in the 1970s and sugary Mateus wines from Portugal that my non-drinking mother thought was a great Christmas gift.

Sunday morning at 9:00 I went to a tasting session, open to the public at Vinea, of sweet wines made by more than 30 producers’ from Valais. The hour was not my choice, I assure you. These are winemakers who subscribe to the charter of Grain Noble ConfidenCiel wines, meaning they agree to a set of rules to guarantee quality. Afterwards I spoke to the co-director of Nez du Vin, a French company that sells wine aromas and wine courses. I mentioned my new love of sweet wines and he threw his arms up in excited Gallic fashion and cried out, “Oh! Those wines! They have you on your knees, why, it’s just like going to church!”

I think many of these are among the best drinks I have ever tasted, a startling discovery. They range in colour from pale gold to deep amber (photo to follow) and all are made with late harvest grapes, which means they are left on the vines until anywhere from late October to January. They shrivel, look unappetizing, give off a pungent grapey smell which permeates the winter vineyards. These withered grapes are referred to as flétri in French. Take a walk among the vines in January and you’ll find the odd one left on the vines: pinch it off and taste it: concentrate of grape but not as chewy or dry as raisined grapes.

In good years, and in a very few special places, some of the grapes develop Noble Rot, aka Botrytis cinerea. In a humid climate this can quickly turn the grapes rotten, with a couple notable exceptions. France’s sweet Sauternes are made from grapes plucked off the vine quickly once they are touched with Noble Rot, which gives them their special flavour.

But the Valais has a wonderful friend called the foehn, a warm dry wind that whistles down the Rhone Valley. It allows the Botrytis to develop well past the normal harvest, without the grapes putrefying. The result is a deep, rich, usually powerful wine that has a marked aroma of mushroom and truffle. The flétri wines are a paler shade of gold and are far more fruity, with an astonishly grapey aroma (not all wines smell primarily of grapes).

These are not wines I would drink with a meal, although some are wonderful as desserts wines, others are nice after dinner and a few work well before a meal, with the right dish. But where I would once have considered a Port or Armagnac after a meal I now think that a beautiful sweet wine, maybe with a handful of good walnuts from the tree down the road or a sliver of very dark chocolate, is a great way to end the day.