DRY Is Good, SWEET Is Yucky I think the origina post was referring to "cheap" sweet wines such as those that one used to find on the market. Sweet wines make everything more difficult, but the results can be stunning. First, you need to find some great sweet wines, and they tend to be expensive. Any sweet wine under $30 is probably made by "cheating", you want something from true late vintage or botrytis, with lots of acidity and plenty of terroir. Ice wines, even good ones, are perhaps the hardest to match, I don't bother. Botrytis adds the kind of complexity that one wants in order to open up the creative possibilities for food matches, and IMHO these are the best wines to play with. While these wines are perfect on their own, some of us have taken to the challenge of matching them to food. The matches tend to be very focused, they require a lot of experimenting, a lot of tuning, but once you get it right it can be breathtakingly successful; a slight change in the balance of spices can ruin everything though, so there is no easy recipe, you just have to experiment. There are no rules. Some guidelines might help. Avoid fat foods with sweet wine, they tend to make a nasty mix with sugar; foie gras can be married with sweet wines, but not as easily as the press might want you to think. Salty spicy foods can create peasant contrasts to the sweet acidity of great sweet wines. Oysters and Yquem are supposed to be wonderful, that is what Lur Saluces told me, and I can only believe him. I find Japanese cooking lends itself to experiments with sweet wine. Cheers Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France 
|
|||||||
