WINES AND DESSERTS - HOW TO COMBINE THEM
For finer occasions it is always really nice to have a delicious dessert and some appropriate wine to it. For desserts, you usually want a lighter wine, with some sweetness in it, and some fruitiness in many cases. Sweet sparkling white wines are therefore a good choice for desserts, and one that is very versatile and suits many sweet dishes is a wine made of muscat grape. Now, several types of muscat grape wines exist and it can be hard to choose the 'most appropriate' one, but besides following our advice here, you can try and test what works for your own palate. There is really no right and wrong when matching wines and food when it comes to personal taste. In general, you want a more acidic wine for fruity desserts, and lighter wines for lighter desserts, simply to match the flavors.
Now, there are many sweet wines made out there, and many of these are produced from grapes that are cultivated for a longer time, so they get infected by a Botrytis cinerea (noble rot) fungus that will 'shrink' the grapes and therefore concentrate the sweetness in them. The most famous sweet wines that you should try, and I think you should do this in the first hand, come from France, and the most famous sweet wine in the world is probably from Sauternes (from Bordeaux region). Sauternes wines include a.o. Barsac, Loupiac, Cérons, Cadillac, or Monbazillac, and they are made of the sémillon grape that has a certain citrus flavor to it, or also from sauvignon blanc and muscadelle grapes. These wines are golden colored due to the concentrated amount of color molecules in the noble rot affected grapes. The most popular, and expensive, producer for Sauternes wines is Château d'Yquem. Other good dessert wines of France are made in the Loire valley of chenin blanc grape, and they are lighter and more refreshing with hints of honey and pineapple. In Alsace, you can find fine gewürztraminer and tokay pinot gris wines, which are more rich and better suited for flavor-intensive desserts, not bad with chocolates. In Rhone valley then, you find the already mentioned muscat grape wines, the better ones being Muscat de Lunel, or Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise.
Other countries are also worth trying - for example, Germans and Austrians have their world-famous riesling grapes and fine riesling wines - very refreshing and light, good for likewise desserts. The wines there are labeled differently than in France, so, for the sweet German wines:
Auslese = light and sweet wine from late harvest and hand-selected sweet grapes;
Beerenauslese = even sweeter wines from grapes that have been left on the vine for a longer time and got attacked by noble rot that dehydrates the grapes and makes them even sweeter;
Trockenbeerenauslese = as beerenauslese but these grapes are specially selected, and very very expensive;
Eiswein = made from grapes that freeze on the vine since they are left on it for a long time, also sweet.
It is also worth to mention the Spanish sherry from Malaga and Madeira, and the Portugese port wines, and the Italian vin santo that should be tried and tested by wine enthusiasts.
For more detailed dessert wine matching go to the next page...