Why Pairing Cab Sauv And Bread Pudding Will Always Fail with Richard King

Is your favorite red wine suddenly undrinkable when you pair it with dessert? You’re not alone. Sugar in wine and food is one of the biggest sources of wine pairing fails—and most people have no idea why! 

In this episode of Everyday Sommelier, expert Sommelier, Richard King, joins host Kristi Mayfield. The goal? To decode the complexities of sweet wine pairing and how sugar changes everything you thought you knew about enjoying wine with food.

Ever wonder why that big, bold red you loved with steak turns to “tree bark” when paired with cake, how hidden sugars in sauces and cuisines can throw your wine off balance, and why embracing dessert wines is the game changer your palate craves? We've got you covered!

Kristi and Richard break down the differences between entry-level sweet wines and complex, intentionally crafted dessert wines, reveal how to choose the right sweet wine (even on a budget), and share why acidity is the unsung hero of the best dessert wines.

Plus, get practical tips for trying new wine styles, avoid the classic wine-with-dessert disaster, and discover why dessert wines can be both the finale and the star of your meal.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• Why pairing dry red wines with sweet desserts is a recipe for disappointment—and the science behind it
• The difference between everyday sweet wines and true dessert wines (and why it matters for your pairing)
• How acidity and balance in dessert wines keep them from being sugar bombs
• fProven strategies to find your favorite dessert wine—and make every pairing a memorable one

TIMESTAMPS & KEY TITLES

00:00 – Avoiding Wine and Dessert Fails: Why Your Red Wine Tastes Terrible with Sugar
04:00 – Why Most People Hate Sweet Wines (and How to Rethink Them for Food Pairing)
11:00 – The Truth About Dessert Wines vs. Sweet Table Wines: What Sets Them Apart
17:00 – Top 3 Dessert Wines You Should Know for Perfect End-of-Meal Pairings
24:15 – Rule #1 for Pairing Sweet Wines with Food: How to Never Ruin a Dessert Pairing Again
27:14 – Unexpected Pairings: Sweet Wines with Spicy and Savory Dishes for Advanced Foodies

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Transcript

Kristi Mayfield (00:00)
It's Friday night and you have just had an amazing dinner at your favorite local hangout. You are feeling celebratory. So you decide to order that dessert you've had your eye on throughout the meal. It is decadent. It is buttery. It is caramely. It's sweet. It's divine. Every single bite is better than the last. You could not imagine a more perfect experience. So you grab your glass of red wine that you had with dinner,

big bold packed with a punch red with its oaky, cedary nuances and it's dry as a bone tannins and you take a magical sip and BAM! Ugh gross yuck! The wine that was once delicious with your meal it's now like chewing the bark off a tree and not that luscious liquid you loved just a few minutes ago. So what the heck just happened?

if you've ever had this experience or one similar to it trust me

The wine that you loved did not all of the sudden go mysteriously bad. It just had a horrible reaction with the main component of your dessert, sweet, lovely sugar. And in today's episode, Richard King is back with me to break down sugar and wine interactions and to turn the tables on how many of you may perceive sweet wines. You are in for a delicious treat. So stay tuned.

Kristi Mayfield (01:44)
I'm guilty, fantastically guilty of drinking my dessert. While I love a delicious sweet cake or a tart pie, even a cookie, I'm even more a fan of lusciously sweet dessert wines. The good news is they can pair perfectly with that sweet concoction that we so love at the end of a meal, whether on a Tuesday night or for a big celebration. But here's the thing.

There are a few tips and tricks to creating the perfect pairing when it comes to sweet foods and sweet wines. And I could not think of a better person than Richard to share with you how to create your own magical moments with both.

Kristi Mayfield (02:28)
Well, we are back with Richard King from Ellerbe and leveraging not only the fact that he has such a tremendous experience as a sommelier in the DFW area, but he and I share a passion for sweet wines. And I think the thing that shocks me the most is such, sometimes I get this visceral, almost hatred from people around, hate sweet wines. And I think that it's,

not necessarily they really do hate sweet wines, but it's it's misunderstood because they probably either had the wrong sweet wine or they've had it with the wrong things. so today we are going to really dive in pairing sweet wines with the right types of foods because sugar is actually hidden in so many things that we eat without us even knowing from sauces to well, obviously there's desserts, but

You know, sauces and glazes and even different cuisines such as Asian cuisine can have a lot of sugar in them and we just don't know it. So we are going to talk about what goes wrong. Yep. But we're also going to veer towards what to do to make it right. Sure. Because my goal today is for you to walk away from this episode as a true fan and an explorer of sweet wines. Perfect.

So Richard, what are some of the most common problems when you are talking to your customers about dessert wines, whether it's misperceptions, whether it's failed food and wine pairings? What are some of the big problems that you're trying to overcome when you're introducing sweet or dessert wines into a pairing? Well, I try to make it relative. I think a lot of times we forget when we are younger what we drink.

And so I just, you know, let's all be honest. When we were, when we were younger, we weren't drinking fine and rare white and reds, you know, our very polished white and red wines. at least I wasn't, let's put it that way. I was drinking Moscato d'Asti I mean, started out drinking. Boone's Farm Strawberry. Boone's Farm. Hey, listen, it's what it is. Right. And, and, one, we started out, you know, usually drinking and eating foods that are sweeter.

Because you're just little bit. It's more comfortable for us for our palates to here in the US to get into things in the beginning and on the sweeter presence. And then as we grow older, our palates get more refined. We pull this sweetness out of what we eat and drink. And so as I've grown older, I love sweet wines, but it's a different kind of sweet wine. Great point. And I love sweet foods, but different kind of sweet foods. You know, not eating candy as much as I used to as a kid.

I'm going, the sweet means more the glazes and things like that, you know, things like that. So wine's the same way. I love sweet wine, but I like a different sweet wine than I did 30 years ago.

So now wines that are sweet on purpose, you know, that are that are made on purpose that have a vision to go with food. Those are the ones we're kind of drinking now. So that brings like an interesting segue question to the fact that as your palate matures, a lot of us have moved away.

and our listeners palates might've moved away from those sweeter wines into drier styles. we have a tendency when we go out to dinner, we order our appetizer, our salad, and our entree, and our dessert, but we may stick with that same bottle of wine through the whole thing. So we may have like that drier Merlot or Bordeaux blend or Pinot Noir, or even a dry Chardonnay or Riesling.

And then we're trying to pair that with our key lime pie or our chocolate tort, which can bring a whole experience. For sure. And we pair, we think about that as, kind of a negative against the wine. Yep. So what's happening there? when I go to guests at the tables, a lot of times, um, you know, ask them, what are you drinking at home?

you know, so I can kind of get an idea of what you what your palate is like, right. And also for also kind of an idea what you want to spend on per bottle. Right. was a safe way to go. ask. And I would say a majority over over half the time, people are giving me pretty big and bold and very fruit forward red wines that have a sweetness to them just because of how they're made or where they're made. These are red wines that don't have sugar added to them, but they are naturally fruit.

forward. Very fruit forward that has perceived a higher sugar content. So then I know then that that wine will only go as only actually only a couple of dishes. So are you willing to pull to go a little bit on the on the wines of that outside your box a little bit or trust your server or SOMM or the chef to make sure that red wine going to

pair better with those dishes than what you drink at home. I'm trying to get anyway to drink at home because I want to see where you are. Okay. If your palette wise, but then at my job is to make sure that the two go to go together. So if I gave you what you want at home and then I'll let you order what you want the table, we're probably going to miss the mark. Yeah. For my job. The chef missed her job. The song missed your job, but you your job also letting us guide you to so

If you are wanting a good experience either at your house or at restaurant, let the experts, if you don't know how, right? Let the experts guide you of like, okay, I get it. We want to do big reds, but let's go to red that is going to go well with that dish. Now you might have a dish that has some natural sweetness to it already. So I'm going to pick a red that has some good sweetness to it as well. just think, you know, back to the question about the perceived of the sweet wines is

we go back to that sweet, you know, that blue bottle Riesling. Well, yeah, we all, we, but we've all had it. We've all, I've had a ton of it in my life. I don't drink it much anymore. but I'm not drinking that anymore. I'm drinking it. Other Riesling center, uh, may have just much sugar, but now they asked it, which we talked to the priest episode, the acid is coming up in the wine. So it has more of that balance on those. Exactly. And so

to that point, they do, you as a listener or a guest wants that, say, big bold red with your entree, how does that translate then and what experience can that create if you're continuing to drink that though into your dessert course where you know you're going to have a sweet dish in front of you? So beyond the entree, you can manage that through different levels of

of sweetness in the wines, but when you switch gears to dessert, there's no dry red. That's right. Yeah. sweet wine, sweet desserts and dry reds are just polar opposites. Yeah. They don't, they, were there. They're, they're, not even married. They're they got a divorce where they even got married kind of situations. So they, they're not on the same page when they won't, they will not date. So, uh,

It just, it'll make the wine really bitter, really tannic, and it'll make the dessert just almost too sweet. Interesting. Too sweet. So now, like myself, my wife, we drink, we do a lot of liquid dessert as our last course. I couldn't agree more. And so sometimes I don't want a dessert, you know. Like a food. A food. But I will drink any kind of Sauternnes or Madeira as my dessert because

it hits that sweet note that I want to finish my meal with and kind of top off my palate. But again, it's liquid. It has so much more complexity to it sometimes than some just straight desserts may have. But I love all the acids that are coming on this one. So yeah, sweet was sweet. But also, do like sweeter wines with acidic foods as well. on savory side, but dessert wines and dessert

last course is probably one of the best pairing you can ever have at a meal. So I think what you've just shared, I'm thinking going back to the very beginning when we were talking about, you know, sweet wines that a lot of people start with and some people continue with because that's their flavor profile. And I'm not here and I know you're not here to say you shouldn't drink any style of wine. If you love it, drink it. So but things that are more on the sweeter side that a lot of us are

uses our of our entry wines because it mirrors the sweetness we may have like in our sodas or in other like cocktails that we drink that have simple syrups and other sweetness. And it's a nice transition. But when it comes to, going full on then into what we call a true dessert wine, there are sweet wines, there are off dry wines, there are dessert wines.

And how do you educate somebody on really what those differences are? Because I mean, a true dessert wine has a lot of different, one, the way it's made, two, the intent and purpose of what it should be paired with and how it should be consumed. They're vastly different. But at the same point in time, we're still talking about sugar. Answer is simple. Buy a wine, try it. love that. mean, you can't, you don't know what a strawberry tastes like until you try a strawberry.

Okay, so you can describe it as the flavor of strawberry all day long until you have a strawberry. So we can't have really good dessert wines until you try some dessert wines. And dessert wines are actually also really good value wines. And here's why I tell people, because one, you can go to your local retailer and buy across the board from a white Sikki wine to a port, to a non-fortified dessert wine.

All kinds of styles and you're not gonna break the bank even buying like four or five different kinds of styles you can get all those probably for under a hundred bucks all five wines and Try them. Here's the best thing about them, too is you get to pop these wines and they will last in your refrigerator For you see up to two to three weeks, maybe even longer depending on what it is Yeah, so because you you know and these bottles us were buying there We call them half bottles or their their 375 milliliter, which is a half of an almost size bottle, right?

And you're only drinking anywhere from an ounce and a half to two and a half ounces of these wines versus a normal bottle of wine. You're drinking, four to... Ten? Up to the bottle, right? So you can buy a nice dessert wine and drink it over weeks or a month, right? And you're only having a little taste of it at end of your meal. So that's the best way to learn. And, you know, people are like, why just really don't love ports? OK, well, that's fine. Then you're finding your wheelhouse at what you like.

But I like Sauternes you know, I like that more that honey and apricot, you know, for profile. Okay, then great. You know, but I like more of the fig notes. I like more a fig and raisins to nuts. Okay, then let's go to port and Madeiros, right? are you a chocolate lover? Are you a fruit lover at dessert? Right? So it goes the same way dessert wines. No, that's a really great point, because I think one of the misnomers that I, that I catch is that people think sweet wine when you

talk about sweetness in wine, people want to lump it all into the same category of some of those early wines that we might have consumed that are really low alcohol, really high sugar, and they have a complete purpose in the world. But you can't really put a white Zinfandel in the same bucket as a beer and beerentrokenauslese Riesling. And again, don't mean to get fancy on words. All that really means is it's a super late harvested Riesling grape.

that is almost dried when it's picked off the vines.

So how do you educate somebody on the differences without trying to get into a master sommelier level? I like to call more dessert and fortified wines. Yeah. You know, I think the word sweet, it means kind of only one thing. We think candy and sugar and kind of sweet here. will you get some of those notes on the wine? Yes. But you also get 25 other notes besides when you say sweet.

But dessert wines cover the gamut, fortified wines. The wines we consumed younger, they didn't care about thinking through that whole entire process, which created the headaches in mornings.

But these wines are intense, like very intense and complex in flavor and profile. But again, a little bit goes a long way. Hence, same thing as dessert, as on the table, you're not eating a whole pie, you're eating a slice of pie. You're not drinking a whole bottle of Sauternes you're having a glass of Sauternes. So a little bit goes a long way, just to really have that finish on the back end. if I could try to dissect that in simple terms.

Sweet wines, you can almost put into two buckets. One, it's intentionally sweet from just a point of having a wine that's sweet. It's simple. There's nothing really complex about it. And I'm talking about things on the, you know, just kind of those entry wines, which again, nothing wrong with it, but Moscato's, White Zinfandels that sort of thing. Dessert wines on the other end of the spectrum are deliberately made, whether it's because they were harvested late,

They were, they have a fortification process to stop the fermentation, to keep that sugar level. But it is an intentional wine making style in order to create that dessert wine that does have a lot of sugar remaining. We're letting the wine do the work for us versus the person behind the process do all the work. I'm not taking the job of the winemaker.

the last process you just talked about was all the grapes did all the work for us. They naturally let the water evaporate out because it hung on the vine longer, or it dried on mats. How are we going to get it? And so that water is evaporating at it. So we have more concentration of pure fruit and sugar in that grape versus having to add in a sugar or a kind of fruit into a wine.

That visualization is so key because if you think about it, you know, as you're listening to this podcast, if you go to your grocery store and you take a bunch of grapes, whether it's green grapes, red grapes, purple grapes, black grapes, doesn't matter. They're juicy. They're plump There's a lot of water content in them. And if you press that content out, you're going to get a tablespoon or so of liquid. Go to a different aisle and grab some raisins.

and do the same pressing function and you might maybe get like a tiny little dribble of liquid out of it. And again, so that's what we're talking about is just the difference in the condition of that grape when the winemaker is attempting to make a wine out of it. Right. That's a great visualization. Okay, perfect. So then let's go back to dessert wines. And if you're having a conversation with someone

in your restaurant who is ordering your best selling dessert and it's a magical dessert and you know that the whatever they were drinking during dinner is not going to be a good pairing. Let's talk now about the different styles of true dessert wines and tell me what your top three selling dessert wines might be so that our listener can understand that

not all dessert wines are made the same, not all taste the same, and it's not just about the sugar. Yeah, so the three that, and it's a great question, the three that we kind of sell here the most, I think restaurants in general are retail stores sell the most of. First probably be a port wine. Okay, port, yep. Second would probably be a white dessert wine out of France, would be a Sauterne.

or a salturn like style wine. We have a lot of great white wines also, dessert wines coming out of the United States as well. Either made and we'll try to style or we even have like the ice wines, finger lakes and things like And then the last one we sell is a Madeira, which is my personal favorite because it has a lot of great sweetness to it.

but it has a lot of savory characteristics to it as well. so your question is here, you know, here at Ellerbe we're kind of for our bread pudding and it's mama's bread pudding, not in your traditional style of bread pudding. So it is sweet, Throws off a lot of cinnamon. We don't have any nuts in it, but it has a natural nuttiness to it, of all the the nutmeg and things that are going into that.

It has cream, has whiskey sauce and all that kind of stuff and brioche. Okay, so have a lot of sweet but we're throwing a lot of things in the kitchen in there of components as well. I love Madeira because Madeira has a sweetness to it as well, but it has a big time nuttiness behind it. So it pairs really well that nuttiness which may not be necessarily in the bread pudding elevates that bread pudding just a little bit of more of nuttiness in the bread pudding that didn't have but it's perceived that it has because of the pairing. And that whiskey sauce is pretty sweet.

So obviously we'll do a Sauternes. Sauternes is gonna go great. But actually that whiskey sauce is so sweet. I wanna bring that whiskey sauce down in sweetness a little bit. That's why I my Madeira. Cause Madeira still has really a lot of acid in it. Yeah. And so that's kind of my favorite pairings, but also I'm a junkie for Madeiros as well. Well, you brought up acid and we talked about that extensively in the last episode. And I think that's one of the things that people aren't aware of, which makes for

the best dessert wines is having that high acidity to balance that sweetness. If it's just all a sugar bomb, it can taste like alcoholic cotton candy, which I'm sure somebody is making somewhere, but it doesn't necessarily sound great. But if you add that acidity on the back end, really does tame down the sugar. So it's still sweet, but it's not cloying. And then that acidity gives it that brightness and that lift that it needs.

Yeah. I mean, mean, like on our previous example of podcasts, we talked about, you know, let's say with Sauv blanc as being one of the very highly acidic varietals. Well, saut blanc and Semillon are the two most widely used white varietals in a dessert wine. Yeah. For that reason. Yeah. It's because they throw off so much acid, but they also can make a really great fortified dessert wine as well because of that balance. Keep talking about balance and that balance of

having it either hang on the vine longer to for the botrytis to set in or an ice harvest to set in. But where that the acid is really becoming really intense in it. But so is the sugar. But guess we don't have any more. We don't have that water. Right. It's gone. It's it's it's it's minimal. Right. And so we have this really acidic varietal with throw it now. We never think saut blanc has a sweet wine. No. But now that sugar is now all held in that little berry. Right. And so we have this

all this sugar, a little bit of pulp, a little bit of wine, mean a little bit of water, but all that acid is with everything else, it's naturally happening. And so now you have this beautiful balance of how it's gonna work out together. that's why I love the white, I mean, I love the reds too, that white, those white wines have really high acid, works so great just naturally. Like I said, mother nature is she is doing her job. She's like, hey, I'm giving you the perfect berry. Now, Mr. and Mrs. Winemaker, you take it. And then that's where they get up.

take and make it their own kind of your one. if somebody just in general says, I don't like sweet wines, so I'm not gonna like dessert wines. How do you make that transition? what would that bridge look like? And I love the fact that most dessert wines, you're not talking about a five to 10 ounce pour like we talked about, you're really talking about an ounce or two.

It's sipping. These are sipping wines. Yeah. And again, okay, let's put it into a virtual perspective. I'm bringing whiskey into play. So if you're going to have a nice whiskey, you're right. You're not going to drink three ounces or two and a half ounces of whiskey just like this. You know, just go down the hatch. because it's so intense.

Right. There's so much going on. Well, one is what alcohol going on on the whiskey. OK, which we do have definitely high alcohol going on in certain lines. So we're looking from a still wine anywhere from being 11 up to like 14 and half percent. Well, dessert wines were looking at from usually around 16 up to around 20 percent. That's a great point. Big, big, big change in alcohol on that side. So one, we want that alcohol to we want to be able to taste the product, the beverage and not just alcohol. So we don't just down the hatch.

we sip on this wine to get every, and we hold it in our mouth for a little bit. And so dessert wines, the same thing is like, you're right, two a half ounces for, I mean, for a purpose. know, a lot, a little goes a long way, if you will. And that's just cause they're just, like I said, high alcohol, high sugar, high fruit. You don't need a lot of it. the, the dessert wine in itself can be the dessert, which I love. Yes. Which is the majority of time for us.

I mean, listen, I love great desserts, but just dessert wines are just, don't know. And usually they have stories behind them. You know, I love, I go back to Madeira's is like, you know, you can have old Madeira's that may be expensive out of the gate. Right. So let's say you want to spend a hundred dollars or above on a bottle of Madeira that's, 30 years old. Well, you got a history in a bottle that, you know, let's say it's a hundred dollars for a 19, you know, let's call it 80 Madeira, know, 85 Madeira or port, right.

But you're getting a lot of history in the bottle that you could open up and you can still consume that Madeira over the next year. Yeah. Right. And so you can like, oh, I don't want to spend $100 or $300, $500. Well, that's a lot of money. I get it. But you can you can have a little bit over a year. And now you're going to talk about that. You got to show everybody every time they come to their home to have a really cool wine that may be expensive in the beginning, but you're just taking you a year to go through that. And so I tell people like, listen, you're buying you're buying a hundred dollar bottle of tequila. That's really nice tequila.

You're drinking it over a year, right? We're hoping you are in theory, but but that's it's the same thing comes with these desert wines is you can spend this money on dessert and that's why and then it slowly just enjoy it over time versus we open a bottle of Cabernet or Chardonnay. We we gotta consume that within one to three days, That's all the ones that going to hold up to not dessert because again, it's a national preservative. National Preservatives sugar and alcohol. I'm sorry, acid so.

You have something that's going to age forever. when you think of investing in a good dessert wine, it's like investing in a good spirit, bottle of spirits. you want to, but again, if you're testing the water, don't go out and say, Hey, give me a hundred dollar bottle of a dessert wine. No, don't do that. Start off to figure out what kind of dessert wines you like first and then work your way through it. Right. And so just like anything, you're not going to go off and buy the most expensive thing off the bat. Find out what you like first, know, all different styles in different regions.

Taking everything we've talked about and in principle from a food and wine pairing, classic, traditional, I'll call it a rule or guideline. Let's talk about guidelines instead of rules. You want your dessert wine, your wine to be sweeter than the food you're pairing it with. Why is that? then why would you not put that dessert, same dessert wine, maybe with a steak or fish and chips? What's happening?

Yeah, so that's a very, that's kind of rule 101 is pairing dessert wines with dessert courses is that you want the sweetness level to be the same or dessert wine to be a little bit a hair sweeter than the dessert. One, because, you know, on the last episode, we were kind of showing how red wines do with chocolate and then we did this hot turn, right? And so that that semis that chocolate had, which was like about 60 % cacao.

it was still pretty bitter, but not super sweet. that's the certain that's to turn was a little bit sweeter than the chocolate was. Well, it made it actually made the chocolate kind of go away. Remember that, right? The other notes of the chocolate way, but made that dessert wine really that fruit that you said apricot, apricot, apricot, it's kind of just lifted. Right. And I was thinking that was the sugar that was in that chocolate. And that little back end of that chocolate was pushing forward all those really great fruit notes on that side. So I like to go a little bit sweeter.

you don't want to necessarily go sweet wines with dry, acidic foods. Like a steak could be, we don't think a steak is being dry, but it really kind of is, because all the fat that's in there, it's a dry protein, it needs tannins and it needs things like that. It doesn't need sugar. Right. Right. And so when you have a steak and dessert wine,

traditionally, by the way, I on steak because I mean, I've had a blue cheese crusted steak with a Burney sauce with a sauterne and it was delicious. was gonna say, yeah, that sounds very good. But again, we're going outside the box of cooking. And you're looking at the sauce pairing, not the not the protein. Exactly. So if we're just trying to, it's a good old grilled, you know, ribeye with salt, pepper on it, olive oil, the sauterne will not do it justice. The sauterne will go away. The steak will like, okay, the steak's not bad, but the sauterne, you wasted your time on your sauterne.

In general, dessert and the sweet wine need to be at least the same sweetness for the wine a little bit more. and sometimes even with varietals like, let's say Riesling, labeling on Riesling could be tricky. And you may think you're getting a dry Riesling when it's actually an off dry Riesling. And you try that with something that needs to pair with a very dry wine and you end up getting a mismatch simply because you weren't expecting that.

sugar level in that off dry Riesling. I think those are some things to be aware of. But dessert wines, think, have these kind of misnomers. And I think we need to move past that. And so I really encourage everyone, like you said, just go try it, go get a couple of bottles. Don't spend a lot of money, but just try them, but try them with the right dishes. Well, and you brought up also, I guess I was kind of going down pigeonholing saying dessert wines.

back to the sweet wine example is Riesling's, right? And so I'll try Riesling. There's going to be some natural sweetness into that wine that's coming, you know, again, that varietal has high acid, high sugar already. And we do see dessert wines made out of Riesling, but we see a lot of still wines made out of Riesling. And some of the best wines in the world are Riesling's, right, that we love. And again, go back to a non-dessert dish. So, you know, in Texas, have, we eat a lot of Mexican food here.

our family enjoys a lot of Asian flavors. And so we have a lot of spice that's going on in some of our cuisine here in our state or, other cuisines as well. And sweet, wines, like an off-try Riesling, really pulls our tames, our combs that heat down. And it makes those dishes just more epic and more mind blowing, you know.

To me, there is nothing better than an off dry Riesling or an off dry Gewurztraminer with a spicy curry. Amen. I'm with you. with you. the key thing that I love our listeners, Richard, to walk away with is that sweet wines aren't necessarily our starter wines that we talked about. And again, if you love a Moscato, there's some great Moscatos out there. We're not poo pooing that at all. We're not telling you don't drink that white Zinfandel.

But what we really are talking about are these like epic styles of true dessert wines that are made in unique ways that we can get into on other episodes, because it's pretty cool. But they are specifically designed for pairing either as your dessert itself or with desserts or even cheese courses that really bring out the nuances.

dessert wines are not about the sugar. It's about the complexity. It's about the winemaking styles. It's about the history. It's about the story. It's about the longevity of these wines. And that's something completely different than just focusing on sugar and wine. 100%. And get outside your box. If you're going to be ordering in some food and you're going to be ordering some Mexican or Asian food, you can do dessert wine with it actually during a course.

dessert wines only have to go with dessert. dessert wine can go with some great food as a savory dish. But also, I like to Riesling's example of get some Riesling's is also like, well, I don't really love Riesling's. Well, I promise you, Riesling's need food and food needs Riesling. so we're staying with second reason, there's other, Gruner, Veltliner, Gversimeter, things like that too. But things like that is like go to your shop and grab a couple of those wines. And maybe that maybe

by themselves a little bit sweeter. Gosh, a little bit sweet, but also you have that with a dish, like that sweetness goes away. Now you taste the wine and you taste the dish too. I think we need to do a whole episode on Riesling alone. I love it. We can. Well, Richard, I think we have covered so much ground with dessert wines. And again, the message is get out and try some. You won't love all of them. And we're not saying you should love all of them, but I guarantee you if you try enough of them and pair them with the right things or just have them by themselves, you are going to find a dessert wine.

that you're going to fall in love with. And that's what this is all about. That's All right. Buy and try. Buy and try. All right. Well, perfect. Well, cheers.

Kristi Mayfield (29:48)
I hope the next time you finish a meal, you'll order dessert and a dessert wine and explore the magical pairing that it can truly be. if you know other sweet tooths other than yourself, share this episode with them. Click pause, go to your favorite podcast platform, copy this link and text it to them right now. They will thank you for doing so.

to continue your wine journey follow me on my Instagram at Kristi Everyday Sommelier, K-R-I-S-T-I Everyday Sommelier. And in our next episode, we're going back on the road, but with a whole new twist to learn how wine can be that magical connector if you're traveling solo or even dining out by yourself.

So until then, cheers my friend to learning line your way.