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2001: Le Prix Champagne Lanson Ivory Award for investdrinks.org

2011: Vindic d'Or MMXI – 'Meilleur blog anti-1855'

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2012: Born Digital Wine Awards: No Pay No Jay – best investigative wine story

2012: International Wine Challenge – Personality of the Year Award




Sunday 30 November 2008

Sweet wines not dessert wines

1993 Le Marigny Domaine des Aubuisières, Vouvray Moelleux Bernard Fouquet



One of my stock rants or hobby-horses is the UK’s wine trade’s absurd practice of calling sweet wines – dessert wines. Not only does this quite unnecessarily restrict the occasions that people consider opening a bottle of sweet wine but also they often don’t match desserts well – often they can be a disaster. A sweet dessert accentuates the wine’s acidity and sharply reduces a wine’s sweetness.

Take this fine 1993 Vouvray moelleux from Bernard Fouquet, which we drunk this August with some cheese. 1993 is an unheralded vintage but Bernard’s moelleux is now showing very well – honeyed and delicately sweet it is ideal with cheese especially various blues – that classic combination of sweet and salty. It would probably also worked well with pork noisettes with prunes and a cream sauce – a typical Touraine dish. Equally well I suspect with a rich poulet à la crème and probably magret de canard with a sweet sauce, whose sweetness often clashes with a red.

I did once serve a straight 1994 Coteaux du Layon from Patrick Baudouin with pheasant à la Normande. It was a delicious combination with the cream apple and Calvados.

Bernard's 1993 would not have worked with a dessert – so why continue to use the term dessert wine? Do we have sausage wines?

7 comments:

Georges Meekers said...

Hi Jim,

I agree with you 100% that not all sweet wines match desserts.
However, the answer to your question strangely enough seems 'yes' - if you ask some people in the U.K. trade, that is!
Here's what I came across on another commercial blog some time ago:

“Sausage wine is a description coined by Tony Mason, Majestic’s Trading Director who retired several years ago. It describes a red wine that is good value rather than expensive, more on the rustic side than fine, but interesting and characterful - in other words, the kind of wine Majestic staff would drink with sausages.”
http://blog.majestic.co.uk/2008/03/02/sausage-wine/

Hm,... food for thought?

Anonymous said...

Jim,

I do agree - and of course it applies all the more to Loire wines which are not as sweet as say a Sauternes or a trockenbeerausgelese. However, in fairness to the trade I think the term sweet wine was degraded by some really awful muck in the past and hence the usage sweet wine became untoucable- still that is a long time ago now so perhaps they should get over it.

That said I do tend to keep genuinely sweet wines for desserts and fois gras. Less sweet wines eg from the Mosel are of course stunning aperatives - though I prefer a demi-sec Vouvray to a moelleux for that.

(and I agree with Mr Meekers that a good wine to drink with a good sausage is indeed a find)


Graham

Jim's Loire said...

Hi Georges and Susan

Thanks for your messages. I'm happy to acknowledge Tom Mason's term as a one-off. I have nothing against drinking wine with sausages or finding wines that are suitable to drink with them, but sausage wines is not a category in general parlance as dessert wines mistakenly is.

Jim's Loire said...

Sorry should have been Graham not Susan - my apologies.

Jim

catenians said...

Well put Jim.

Sweet wines should be drunk instead of dessert.

The best wines to match a sweet Christmas Pudding for example is not IMHO the classic Christmas pudding in a glass - PX, but a crisp Champagne or quality mature yeasty Cava - Yin & Yang.

PX is great on its own or with almond biscuits.

But there is an excellent range of wine to drink with spicy food ( If I may say so myself)

Best

Warren Edwardes

http://wineforspice.cm

http://stickywines.co.uk

Jim's Loire said...

Thanks Warren. I take your point about ying and yang but am less convinced than you and the French that sparkling wine and desserts are a good match. IMO it often makes the fizz taste thin and acidic.

Certainly we are in agreement over sweet wines enjoyed by themselves.

catenians said...

" ... that sparkling wine and desserts are a good match. IMO it often makes the fizz taste thin and acidic. "

In theory it should make the fizz less acidic as the acid will counteract the sugar in the dessert and vice versa. Just like adding a mega dosage to fizz.

OTOH by my own "logic" a sweet wine should go well with a sorbet.