Rhubarb dessert

Rhubarb dessert

Assuming a rhubarb pudding, crumble, fool or poached, served with cream or custard.

Rhubarb sets two conditions at once and most sweet wines fail the second. The pudding is sweet, so a dry wine tastes thin and sour beside it. But rhubarb is also one of the sharpest things anyone eats, so a sweet wine without ferocious acidity of its own turns cloying and flat. What is needed is a wine that is sweet and bracing at the same time.

Pairs Perfectly. Riesling Auslese from the Mosel, Germany. German Riesling at this ripeness level is the rare sweet wine that keeps a searing acid line underneath the sugar, which is precisely the shape rhubarb demands. Low in alcohol, so it lifts the pudding rather than weighing on it, and its lime and white peach sit beside the fruit without burying it.

Pairs Well. Vouvray moelleux, Loire, France. Sweet Chenin Blanc tastes of quince and baked apple with a stony acidity that never softens. It is also much the most affordable good sweet wine on this list.

Pairs Well. Tokaji Aszú, Hungary. Marmalade, apricot and ginger with an acidity that comes from the Furmint grape rather than from the botrytis. Richer than the pudding needs, but nothing handles sharpness better.

Worth Seeking Out

Petit Manseng from Jurançon, in the French Pyrenees. Grapes left on the vine into December until they shrivel, making a sweet wine with grapefruit and pineapple and an acidity that is almost startling. Few people have heard of it and nothing meets rhubarb more exactly.

Avoid

Dry wine of any kind. Against a sweetened pudding it reads thin, sour and hollow, and the fault is the pairing rather than the bottle.

Failing That

A late harvest Riesling, Marlborough, New Zealand.

If All Else Fails

Asti, Piedmont.

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