Dessert Wines & Ice Wines
Episode #111
Karen MacNeil teaches three young pastry chef students from the Culinary
Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York about dessert wines. Together,
they travel to the Inskillen Winery and Ice Wine Festival in Ontario, Canada,
to sample ice wine and pair various sweet wines with classic American desserts.
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Let’s look at some of our favorite combinations. Everyone loved the chocolate chip cookies with Port. A natural partner for anything with chocolate, Port’s richness was a great foil for the cookies’ chewy texture. Orange Muscat perfectly complimented the Madeline. Muscat’s exotic citrus flavors were beautifully balanced by the crumbly, buttery cookies. We partnered pear tarts with Sauterne. The match worked because the tarts were slightly less sweet than the opulent wine and because both shared elegant, sweet, fruity flavors. And finally, everyone’s favorite: chocolate cake and an Australian Sticky. Australian Stickies are deep, rich, and profoundly complex, and they’re sensational when the dessert is all chocolate.
Here are some tips to remember about pairing sweet wines and desserts. Wine dessert marriages usually work best when the wine is sweeter than the dessert. And don’t forget about texture. A sweet wine’s soft, almost syrupy texture marries well with the texture of so many desserts. But the most important thing is, don’t be shy. Pairing desserts and sweet wines is about as delicious as fun gets.
Bottle shapes and sizes have a whole story unto themselves. Take, for example,
what is called a punt. A punt is the indentation in the bottom of
the bottle. You’ll notice that on bottles of Champagne, for example,
the punt is very deep – deep enough that many people will pour a bottle
of Champagne with their thumb in the punt. However, that’s not the
reason why it’s there. Punts began as a result of what you could call
a household problem. When bottles were first made, bottle makers blew
the glass and ended the bottle at the bottom, leaving a point called the
pontil mark. When those early bottles were put down on a table, they left
a big scratch, upsetting hosts and hostesses. And so bottle makers began
to turn that pontil mark inward, leaving a rounded surface so that bottles
no longer scratched tables.
Culinary Institute of America
http://www.ciachef.eduInniskillin Winery
http://www.inniskillin.comWine Festival in Ontario
http://www.grapeandwine.comUnion Square Wine Shop
http://www.unionsquarewines.com
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