The New York Times, July 16, 2003

Dessert Wines Before and During Dinner

AMERICANS don’t cotton to elegant dry wines, we are told, because we are raised on Coca-Cola and sugar-coated everything else. In fact, we have taken enthusiastically to dry wines - so much so that, except for Sauternes and port, we tend to look down on sweet wines as gauche, embarrassing, the excesses of misspent youth. But the truth is, in a guilty sort of way, we still love our sweet wines. Only now we call them dessert wines.

We needn’t feel guilty. The Romans liked their wines sweet. The British, during the 300 years they owned Bordeaux, shipped mostly sweet wines back home. And didn’t they invent port? When the Dutch dominated the Bordeaux trade, the wines they sent off to Amsterdam were overwhelmingly sweet. Later still, when the czars came out of the forests and discovered Champagne and Sauternes, they demanded they be sweet, as sweet as - but you can see where I’m going here. The simple fact is, liking sweet wine is neither new nor reprehensible.

And it need not be confined to the dessert course. Some weeks ago, a friend who is a serious wine collector was the host of a dinner where the first course, seared foie gras, was paired with Yquem. His reasoning: the match was a good one (it was), and starting with Yquem gave everyone a chance to appreciate it before rather than after the red Bordeaux he matched with the main course and the cheese. He could not have demonstrated more effectively the versatility of this great Sauternes, Yquem.

When Rodney Strong sold the Sonoma winery bearing his name he joined with some friends in a little wine business called Toad Hollow. “Just to keep from being bored,” he said then. He’s inactive now, but Toad Hollow is booming. Most of its wines are American, but one newer creation, a light sparkling wine called Risqué, is made and bottled in the Limoux region of France.

Blanquette de Limoux, the best-known local wine there, is a sparkling wine made from the mauzac grape with a touch of chardonnay and occasionally a bit of chenin blanc for complexity. Blanquette means white in Occitan, an ancient language still spoken in the region. It’s also the name for the mauzac grape-Risqué is pure mauzac. Technically known as blanquette méthode ancestrale, it’s sweeter, less fizzy and lower in alcohol than Blanquette de Limoux and tastes a lot like a first-rate sweet apple cider. The only thing risqué about it is the can-can dancer on the label.

The méthode ancestrale is an old-fashioned way of making sparkling wine that involves fermentation in the bottle, like the best Champagnes, but bypasses disgorgement, the crucial step in Champagne-making in which dead yeast cells are removed from the bottle before the final bottling.

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