I wonder how it worked out that way historically. A few centuries ago there were some commonly available sweet alcohols like syllabubs, nogs, flips, sweet mead. But now? Liqueurs generally seems to be intended for making mixes out of, not drinking; they tend to be ridiculously high proof and are pretty terrible if you try to drink them straight from the bottle.
You're spot-on with this; I've read a lot of things referring to people's palates preferring sweeter things in the past and I'm not sure what caused the shift. It's often mourned on subjects like port, which can have examples that are beautifully complex and exquisite examples of type, but the modern drinker just isn't into it.
My anecdotal experience (not from any official, cite-able source, just me observing people) is that there seem to be three phases of palate evolution: what I call the "little kid" palate, where sweet = good and bitter = gross, followed by the rejection-of-little-kid-palate where you want MOAR BITTER ALL THE TIME, almost as if to prove you can take it (thinking of the manly-man hoppiest-beer-ever brands that advertise with names that imply it's a "death by hops" challenge of sorts) and then the phase where you suddenly, regrettably, like everything expensive, both sweet and bitter.
I THINK there's biological and psychological reasons behind this: we instinctively crave sugars, fats, salts, etc, for obvious evolutionary reasons of those flavours being scarce in a pre-industrial world and indicative of high caloric density, therefore good, and most bitter flavours are poisons, therefore, children are born with an instinct for what is most nutritious least likely to kill them (the child palate.) I read somewhere that if you are exposed to a certain formerly negative flavour x amount of times and don't die, basically, your brain rewires to say that it is acceptable and safe. Apparently you do this much more easily around 2-4 years old, when you're copying your parents, which is why toddlers forced to deal with eating things like dark bitter green vegetables get over it much more easily than someone who made it to adulthood without getting over it. Evolution in a non-international-shipping world meant you've probably been taught to eat everything you're ever going to eat, because that's all that's available in your region of the world, by the time you're four.
The second phase of prove-how-bitter-I-can-take seems to be some kind of macho pride when you force yourself to cross that acclimation gap as an adult. I think you were spot on with that idea as well. I did it myself - went from HATING coffee (and alcohol, btw - I didn't voluntarily drink until after 21) to only being able to stand, like coffee flavoured ice cream, to affogato, to I WILL HAVE MY DOUBLE ESPRESSO BLACK PLEASE. I've softened out of that now - cubano with a splash of cream - just as most people I know get over their psycho-IPA and fear-of-riesling phase after they've had a few years to revel in the fact that the can finally tolerate bitter.
The third and final unfortunate phase of palate development is what I seem to be hitting now - an uncanny ability to recognize the expensive stuff. It's a chicken or the egg question: is the expensive stuff better, and I have good taste? Or is it expensive because the "pros" like it? I think it's entirely possible that because of some biological reason, anyone who drinks a lot and goes through all the natural phases of palate evolution will eventually end up in the same place, liking the same things. Those things are not necessarily better than anything else, they're just the end of the road if you happen to go that far. However - all "pros" drink a lot, so we all go that far. So suddenly, there's this illusion that "all the pros agree that we like this" when really you could replace the word "pros" with "maxxed out, jaded people." Then the price goes up because it's the things all pros like.
I honestly was really dreading reaching that point people better trained than me kept saying I would. "eventually you won't be able to stand swill." I don't WANT to not be able to stand swill. Swill is CHEAP. I LIKE cheap.
It's kind of like the time when, after a bad breakup, I drank a whole bottle of abolut while eating a family size bag of jalapeno Krunchers, then proceeded to vomit uncontrollably for like two days (like, I couldn't stop gagging long enough to fall asleep, it was awful.) As a result, I am now scarred for life and can not go anywhere near cheap vodka or jalapeno flavoured potato chips. Cheap, fake-sugary "fruit wines" give me a gag reaction for reasons that probably have much more to do with overexposure than relative quality. All the pros (read: alcoholics in suits) I know dislike similar things... probably because we all drink too much.
I should add, I REALLY like many dessert wines (and sweet liquors) but they're all the expensive ones. I more gravitate away from artificial flavours, and require a sense of balance and complexity to go with sugar content. "Good" (whatever that means) sweet wines are almost always very high acid as well, because acid and sugar compliment each other. it's why lemonade is good, but lemon-water or sugar-water minus the third ingredient is not nearly as easy to guzzle.
I wonder if people in the past liked sweet booze because refined sugar was relatively nonexistant? Maybe they gravitated towards it for the same reason people gravitate towards fats and salts - we naturally seek the flavours that indicate the greatest caloric density, and in a situation of scarcity it's impossible to get burned out on it.
I'd put the blame all on the cultural damage done by prohibition, but I haven't really heard that to be the case.
This is totally true as far as I know, btw. Prohibition, world wars I and II, and phylloxera pretty much decimated the world's supply of high quality alcohol production for like 80 years. Almost all of the western world had to re-figure out what it was doing in the 1950s.
Or maybe it has more to do with the cost of ingredients and technical difficulties of getting sweet stuff not to ferment further in the bottle. Someone probably knows, but it isn't me, lol.
This is also true as far as I know, but in a slightly more complicated way. Traditional fermentation without modern equipment was really pretty much something you could only do until it stopped naturally, which was usually after all the sugar was gone. Sweet wines only happened if 1. the region was so cold the yeast died from winter temperatures before it fermented all the sugars, which is why germany has a tradition of sweet rieslings being the ones harvest later, with greater sugar contents to start with and a smaller window of time before the freeze (this is also why champagne originally bubbles - it's fairly far north in france, and the second fermentation was caused by the yeast going dormant with cold, then starting up again in spring) 2. there was SO much sugar in the grape juice the yeast would die from the alcohol content before it could finish the sugars (late harvest and icewines are from such concentrated grapes with so much sugar to so little liquid, even when you reach full alcohol potential there's tons of sugar left) 3. you purposely stopped the fermentation by pouring distilled alcohol (usually brandy) into the wine before it was done, which is how fortified wines like port are made.
But stuff like chocovin and mudslide mix and mikes hard lemonade and wine coolers? That's all because processed sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) are available and cheap in the post industrial world, so we go crazy on it.
.... Now that I think about it, the stuff I don't like is always the stuff that has processed sugar in it. Including sangria. Maybe it's just processed sugar I don't like in wines or wine-cocktails.
But yeah, I don't really care if people consider the wine I like to be crap or not. I'd disagree on the basis that if I like it that makes it good to me, and my opinion is equally valid compared to theirs. So I'd call concord wine "underappreciated" or something more flattering. But they can call concord wine crap if I can call $100 a bottle wine terrible when I don't like the taste.
(And I can certainly appreciate some nice hot gooey nacho cheese; makes me want to plan my Saturday lunch somewhere I can get some.)
I agree with your philosophical point completely. It's all a matter of perspective, and btw, I do (secretly) call all kinds of expensive wines I don't like but am supposed to, crap. But mostly I use the word "crap" as a synonym for "not popular with jaded foodies" and don't really worry about quality connotations with it. If I really thought something was bad, I wouldn't like it, so using the oxymoronic phrase "I like this total crap" it effectively just means "I'm totally happy to be in the minority here." For the purpose you originally put forth of "describing what I want so I can find it," describing sweet concord wine and day glo nacho cheese alike as "no, not the real thing, you know, the cheap crappy stuff," is the most effective method I've found for actually obtaining what I want when asking someone who would sell it to me.
To answer your original question: concord still isn't a wine, it's a grape from which a wine could be made, but ain't nothin' wrong with liking it. Try some of the fancy ones coming out of Virginia side by side with the ones you already know you like, so for your own reference you can isolate if you like the concord-varietal flavour or the sweetness in the style. (any grape can be done dry or sweet, if I haven't mentioned that.) If you want to get REALLY scientific about it, make a four-wine flight with a european grape done in sweet and not sweet styles too, and taste back and forth so you can isolate different combinations of sweet/dry american/european.
Sweet is a style. If you're looking for sweet, the incredibly easy, obvious answer is that there is a category called "dessert wines." ALL of the above - sweet concord, sweet riesling, sweet grenache, sauternes, icewine, tba, port depending on who you ask, framboise, and probably whatever cherry crap from michigan my friendly neighborhood troll friend recommended, fall under "dessert."
Everything else is just memorizing shit because no two places label them the same way.
Also: thank you for making this thread WAY more interesting and complex than these types of things usually are!