It is once again the holiday season; the one time of the year when we allow ourselves the pleasure of traditional meals complete with multiple courses. For the wine enthusiast, such meals offer a unique opportunity to shine; wowing our friends and relations with carefully selected wines paired to each course. In the same way that an orchestra blends dozens of instruments into a single, powerful symphony, the meats, vegetables, breads, sauces and wines of a traditional holiday meal combine to form a culinary symphony; each component working together to create a unique and beautiful experience.
Until dessert. We seem to stumble when it comes to pairing wines with desserts. Most of us will either serve a sweet wine as its own, separate course, or abandon the wine altogether and serve the pie with a cup of coffee instead. Why?
The problem, I feel, is that we don’t understand sweet wine. Traditional sweet wines, such as port, sauternes, madeira and sherry, carry a lot of negative stigmas. They invoke images of sickly sweet, poor quality goop that your great grandparents drank… probably by candlelight… out of tiny little glasses… while listening to big band jazz on a scratchy AM radio. On the other hand, the hip, new varieties of sweet wines, such as ice wines and late-harvest wines, are trendy, and therefore, divisive. One either hates them or loves them and those that love them are mostly neophytes who need their wines to be as sugary as their frozen rum drinks and hard cider.
The first step to understanding dessert wine is to stop thinking about them as something that you pour into glass and guzzle, and to start thinking about them as a component to be incorporated into the dessert experience so that the wine is an integral part of the dessert, in the same way that hot fudge is an integral part of an ice cream sundae. To do that, one must understand how a wine becomes sweet in the first place.
For dessert wines, old world vintners either took red wines with high residual sugar and fortified them with hard alcohol, or allowed the grapes to be partially eaten by a fungus, (botrytis cinerea, for those of you who may want save that for a possible Jeopardy answer some day), which causes the water in the grape to evaporate, thereby concentrating the sugar in the wine. Each process produces very different results. Fortified wines tend to be very sweet and high in alcohol, giving them that rich, syrupy effect that you get with ports and sherries, whereas botrytized wines, such as sauternes, retain the flavors of the grapes (usually sémillon and muscadelle), only in a highly intensified form.
Botrytis Cinerea: a fungus which causes the water in the grape to evaporate, thereby concentrating the sugar in the wine.
Ice wines are exactly that; the grapes are allowed to freeze on the vine, and then harvested and pressed while still frozen. The result is that the water in the grape becomes separated from the sugary juice, resulting in a much sweeter wine, one that is often floral and fragrant.
Likewise, late harvest wines are exactly what the name implies. The grapes are left on the vine until they start to shrivel up like raisins, in a process called, unimaginatively, “raisinating.” This process results in wines that are sweet, but that also have more complex qualities than wines produced simply by removing liquid water from the grapes. Raisinated wines tend to have richer, almost caramelized flavors.
So how does one use them to build a complete, harmonious dessert symphony? Well, the first step is to not offer them to your guests, because at least half of them will turn their noses up and say something predictable like, “Oh, I don’t like sweet wines,” or “Oof, no more alcohol for me!” Instead, simply present the wine with your dessert as one offering without asking. The second step is to serve it in a very small glass. The point of the dessert wine is not to have something to wash down an unfortunately dry pie crust, but rather to give a little complimentary jolt of taste to enhance the food it is served with.
Most important, however, is to ensure that two things are true: 1) that the wine is sweeter than the dessert, and 2) that the flavor of the wine doesn’t clash with the flavor of the dish.
1. Serve dessert wines as part of a pairing, not as a drink with dessert.
2. Serve in a very small glass.
3. Choose a wine that is sweeter than the dessert.
4. Make sure the flavor of the wine doesn't clash with the dessert's flavor.
Traditional holiday desserts typically come in three varieties: overly rich, overly sweet and overly tart. Desserts that are very rich, but not very sweet, such as cheesecake, crème brulée or soft cheeses, can be boosted by any of the dessert wines, and each will transform the food into something completely different. However, give that cheesecake a strong flavor, such as pumpkin or blueberry, and you’ll find that fortified wines and ice wines will clash badly with them.
Desserts that are very sweet need an even sweeter wine, and it is hard to out-sweet a good port. Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, is notoriously hard to pair, but a good, well-aged tawny port puts up a good fight. Ice wines pair nicely with very sweet desserts as well, but they can be very floral and that can sometimes clash with fruit and chocolate flavors. On the other hand, raisinated late-harvest wines and botrytized wines have flavors that are too intense and mellow to pair with anything too sweet.
Fruit pies, especially apple pie, can be more tart than sweet, and this is where raisinated and botrytized wines really shine. Rather than trying to out-sweeten the pie, they intensify the flavors of the tart fruits, while at the same time rounding them out. The effect is something like pouring hot caramel over crisp apples.
It should be noted that I prepared for this article by spending hours comparing various traditional holiday desserts with a variety of sweet wines. There was one very popular holiday dessert that had me stumped, however. Pecan pie. Everything I tried to pair it with clashed horribly. Sauterne came close, but still wasn’t quite right. Then, I tried it with a Tokaj. Tokaj is a botrytized wine made in Hungary and is absolutely heavenly when served alongside pecan pie.
So don’t be intimidated or alienated by dessert wines. Embrace them and use them wisely and you may find that you even wow yourself.