Match of the week

Tiramisu and oxidised sweet wines

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on April 28 2008 at 11:20

This doesn’t, I admit, sound a particularly tempting proposition so let me explain. By oxidised sweet wines I mean dessert wines which have been deliberately exposed to air through extended barrel ageing, giving them a complex nutty, treacley flavour.

The perfect example is a Corsican wine called Rappu from Domaine Gentile I tasted at Il Vino d’Enrico Bernardo, the wine bar in Paris I mentioned the other day which provides just the right dried fruit flavours to complement the coffee, cream and chocolate notes of a tiramisu. Other wines that would do a similar job would be a Rivesaltes vieux ambrée or an Italian or Greek Vin Santo.

Tiramisu is in fact a great foil for all kinds of interesting drinks. You could also pair it with an old sweet oloroso sherry, Bual Madeira or Moscatel, a hazelnut flavoured liqueur like Frangelico or a coffee-flavoured one like Kahlua. or simply follow it with an espresso coffee to echo the coffee notes and balance any excess sweetness.

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