Dessert wines and cat pee

That's right, I said cat pee.

I drank a delightful dessert wine recently. "Dessert wines" tend to be higher in alcohol content than regular wines, with a thicker, almost-but-not-quite syrupy thickness, and a sweet taste.

This one also looked pretty: See? That golden color is just lovely. The wine tasted as rich as it looked. It was sweet but not too sweet. It was a really lovely, refreshing sipping wine. I also had no idea what sauternes was (is), so I looked it up. This particular wine is (rather aptly) described as: Early apricots, honeycomb, orange butter combine across an intricate palate woven with zippy minerality and lemon curd.

Yum, right? Right.

This wine is also made primarily from sauvignon blanc grapes. I found a web page that described sauv blanc like this:

Sauvignon Blanc

Few varietals have spawned as bizarre a list of descriptors as Sauvignon Blanc. Believe it or not, “cat pee” is in fact a complimentary tasting note, associated with some of the best bottlings. (It’s a somewhat odd way of pointing out herbaceousness in the wine.) Cat pee aside, Sauvignon Blanc (sometimes called "Fumé Blanc" in California) is a bit of a chameleon in terms of style, and quite...

 I'm sorry, what was that now? Olives I can handle. Olives I can maybe even appreciate. But CAT PEE?

And you see the part of that quote that says, "cat pee aside..."? I'm sorry, but there is no "aside." There is nothing after "cat pee." NOTHING.