Choosing a wine to complement dessert
Posted by Admin 19.07.2010 | 0 Comments
For those of you out there with a sweet tooth, this month I’ve decided to tackle a really challenging area of matching wine with food: what to drink when eating dessert.
At dinner parties, more often than not when it comes to serving dessert the host will tend to let the guests continue to drink the wine left over from the previous course. However, this can be a bit of a lottery, as the nature of the wine can certainly enhance or detract from the flavour of the dessert.
A good place to start for a dessert wine is the classic Bordeaux Sauternes. These sweet white wines are produced by leaving the grapes on the vines until late in the year until they are rotted by fungus. This is known as ‘the noble rot’ and shrivels the grapes, thereby concentrating their levels of sugar and acidity. Moving further east along the Dordogne, the Monbazillac region is renowned for producing sweet white dessert wines. Monbazillac wines tend to have aromas of orange, apricot, vanilla and honey, and you can have fun matching these with the characteristics of your favourite desserts. Further south-west, the Languedoc-Roussillon region produces fortified wines, known as vins doux naturels, which are excellent dessert wines. The majority of these are made from the white muscat grape, but keep your eye out for wines from the Maury and Banyuls AOCs, many of which offer red dessert wines (so you can colour-match your wine to your dessert as well!).
Dessert wines tend to come in half-bottles and can be fairly expensive, but you don’t have to serve special dessert wines – try experimenting with the fruit flavours of normal wines to see which ones go well with particular dessert dishes. As a general rule, I’d say try to serve a wine which is sweeter than the dessert itself, but this gets tough when you come to really rich, sweet desserts, and in particular with dark chocolate.