ThisNext Blog

You’ve wrapped up the appies and main on the super romantic dinner you made your sweetie on Valentine’s Day. It’s time for dessert. How does the saying go? 

Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker.

Right. Well, you can have your cake and drink with it, too. Whether paired with pastry or just drunk on their own, dessert wines make for a sweet ending every time.

The San Francisco Chronicle rounded up a handful of their favorite North American “stickies.” One of the top rated was the 2002 Lolonis Heritage Vineyards Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc, the description of which reads like a Valentine’s card unto itself:

Winery president Petros Lolonis named this dense, rich wine after his mother Eugenia, who in 1920 emigrated from Greece at age 16 to marry — sight unseen — Tryfon Lolonis, who had spied her years earlier while she was playing at her grammar school. This wine is unctuously full of caramel, coffee, cappuccino and molasses flavors that go sweetly on and on, just like Tryfon and Eugenia’s 47-year marriage.

But California hardly has the corner market on quality dessert wines. Rather, Canada is a star producer of ice wine, one of the most covetable dessert wines out there. In a technique that originated in Germany (where it’s called Eiswein), grapes are left to freeze on the vine and then crushed. The resulting wines are extra sweet, as the ice traps water and increases the intensity of the sugar in the grapes. Ice wines are rich, complex and generally rather expensive due to their low yields.

The Chron gives high marks to the 2004 Peller Estates Niagara Peninsula Icewine Riesling, but that can be difficult to find. More universally available, and certainly a great introduction to Niagara icewines, is the Inniskillin Oak-Aged Vidal Icewine. Serve this stuff well-chilled, and enjoy the ever-changing rainbow of flavors that emerge as it slowly comes up in temperature. You’ll get waves of bright fruit, like apricot, intense spice, mellow honey and much more. If you’re interested in exploring more Niagara icewines, Wine Juice has a roundup of some of the best.

But some of the best desserts wines are not even made from grapes. Using much the same technique as icewine, but using apples, intrepid bottlers in Quebec are producing ice cider.  Probably the easiest to find (and even then, not so easy) is Domaine Pinnacle Ice Cider. Though it has a decidedly apple-y base note, it also has quite a lot of earthy notes and is surprisingly complex. It would make an obvious match for a nice tarte tatin, but would also go very nicely with a good cheese plate.

In the west of Canada, in the up-and-coming Okanagan Valley, Elephant Island only produces wines made from fruits other than grapes. Their Elephant Island Crab Apple Wine is bright and cheerful, yet has enough sweetness to keep from causing you to pucker up. Its acidity allows it to stand up to very rich and sweet desserts, like a zabaglione.

Have I whet your palate for dessert wines? See more of my Sweet Endings list at ThisNext.