POTS AND PANS CITY BLOG

A dessert wine is a sweet wine that is served with or instead of a dessert.  They are often fortified wines like port, sherry or Madeira, or late harvest wines.  Dessert wines could also include Sauternes, Tokaji, Ice Wines and Commandaria. Dessert wines are typically made from older vine-ripened grapes that are even slightly shriveled, which have concentrated the sweetness in them. Dessert wines can be tricky to make because the older fruit are more delicate and the grapes can bruise quite easily.  The longer the grapes remain on the vines to get sweeter, the greater the risk to the wine-maker.

Ice wines are especially sweet and can be expensive.  They are a late harvest wine that because of their sweetness can be served by themselves as a dessert, or go well with fruit or light desserts.  Serving an ice wine with a bowl of fresh fruit drizzled with a little dark unsweetened chocolate would go well together. Strawberries dipped in dark bitter-sweet chocolate would be a good pairing.

A dessert wine served with a dessert such as chocolate should always be sweeter than the dessert it accompanies. It is therefore necessary to pick the type chocolate you are serving with your dessert wine as carefully as it is to choose the wine.   A dessert wine served with a very sweet chocolate dessert would be cloyingly sweet and over-powering in your mouth.  It may give the feeling of eating too much sweet candy all at once.

In choosing the right type of chocolate to pair with a dessert wine, the percentage of cocoa contained in the chocolate is important. The amount of cocoa in the chocolate used will dictate how sweet the chocolate will be—the percentage of cocoa information is usually found the product label.  Milk chocolate, as a rule, has about 30% cocoa and 70% sugar, which generally makes it very creamy and too sweet that does not compliment the palate when served with a dessert wine. 

Darker chocolates with a cocoa percentage range closer to 70% makes a better match with dessert wines such as Madeira.  There are also chocolates that are infused with cinnamon, lavender, pepper or other flavorings that can be found at specialty chocolate shops that would be a pleasant match with a dessert wine.

For a dessert wine and chocolate experience to serve at your next dinner party, a suggestion would be to serve a fruit and chocolate platter.  Arrange various fruits on one side of a platter, and bitter or specialty bitter or bitter-sweet chocolates obtained from a specialty shop on the other half.  Also try including some of the unique-flavored chocolates on the platter for a different taste experience.