A lot has happened since the last post. I cooked a lot of meals, developed an interest in Japanese sake (and got a qualification for it, more on that later), broke my arm, went to Asia to check out the wine markets in Taiwan, S Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and discovered quite a few new food and wine pairings.
In more recent memory, Adam and I invited to lunch this past weekend some wonderfully bacchanalian friends, the kind that you really treasure in your life, who brought over some amazing mature Bordeaux, white Rioja and calvados. In the vein of new food and booze pairings, we had the calvados with an apple tart which went swimmingly well. The tricky part about pairing desserts with wine is that often the sweetness of desserts strip away the fruitness of wines making them seem dull and too acidic. Thus, the classic rule is to pair a dessert with an even sweeter dessert wine to prevent this.
However, I don't have a massive sweet tooth and pairing sweet on sweet just seems like a one-two punch in the face. Although it is a thing already known to some, I happily discovered that pairing a spirit that mimics a dessert's flavours is a great way to drink something indulgent but not too cloying with it. Behold! The beauty of calvados (an apple brandy) with an apple tart! The calvados has a pure, lifted apple note which complemented the tart, and its spirity heat warms up the senses and nasal passages to better taste the apples in the dessert.
We also had snifters of a beautiful aged Mt Gay 1703 rum with chocolate truffles. This worked really well because the rum has an intense caramel note, which is a natural partner to bitter chocolate, and it added the sense of sweetness to the pairing without actually being sweet.
Apparently certain spirits also go very well with cheese too, something I need to explore indeed.
