Match of the week
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Apricot sorbet and moscato di Pantelleria
There were lots of interesting food and wine matches during my trip to Pantelleria and Etna last week with the Sicilian winery Donnafugata but the most surprising one to me was this pairing of an apricot sorbet and a light moscato, the 2022 Kabir.
Surprising because ice-creams and sorbets are hard to match. In the past I’ve found richer more liquorous wines and even liqueurs work best as you can see from this post.
What wine - if any - goes with ice-cream?
Like their famous Ben Ryé passito di Pantelleria, the Kabir is made from zibibbo but unlike Ben Rye the grapes are not sun-dried resulting in a lighter, more fragrant wine that was just 11.5% but one which worked really well with the sorbet.
What would you pair Ben Ryé with then? Depends a bit on its age. When it’s younger it’s rich and orangey, almost marmaladey so you can pair it with relatively light creamy pastries like cannoli or this ‘bacio Pantesco’, a deep-fried pastry filled with ricotta.
More mature ones develop rich treacley notes that work particularly well with a dark chocolate dessert or dried fruits such as raisins and figs,
You can buy the Kabir in the UK for £32.95 from Vinum and £39.06 from Shelved Wine.
(Apologies for the photo but I was a couple of spoonfuls in before I realised what a brilliant match it was!)
Pedro Ximenez and ice cream
The highlight of last week was undoubtedly the Emilio Hidalgo sherry lunch I attended at the Spanish tapas bar Dehesa. But which of the outstanding pairings to pick?
In the end I’ve gone for the one that’s the easiest to recreate rather than the one I was most impressed by (which was the duck and old amontillado - because not all duck dishes would go with all amontillado sherries. It was a match that depended on clever execution and the brilliance of the accompanying sherry.)
Pedro Ximenez on the other hand is almost always a good match for non-fruity icecreams, particularly vanilla, caramel, brown bread icecream and chocolate. It’s the sweetest of Spanish sherries with an intense raisiny flavour and can simply be poured over ice cream or sipped with it.
This particular PX - as it’s called for short - was drier, and to my palate, more balanced than most and a fantastic foil for the dark chocolate sorbet and muscovado ice cream that was served with it (see the rather blurry picture above). It also tasted great when a cup of espresso coffee was brought into the equation - a three-cornered match that was truly delicious.
For the full write-up of the lunch see here.
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