Wine Tips

Matching wine to desserts

When matching wines and food, in general you want to think about complementary and contrasting elements, whether it be taste, aroma, texture or colour. With dessert wines the two rules of thumb are acidity and sweetness. Dessert wines without acidity become too heavy and syrupy in the mouth. Acidity cuts through the heaviness and helps create an unctious taste in the mouth. Ideally your wine should be sweeter than the dessert. Imagine you have a wine that is less sweet than the dessert. You taste the wine first then you eat some of the dessert. All is well. However when you go back to the wine, your mouth is conditioned to the sweetness of the dessert so the wine will be too tart and not nearly as enjoyable.