Working Girl Cooks!

This week I am featuring a Black Muscat dessert wine with the dessert I made for Valentine’s Day. I have never been a huge fan of dessert wines. They have always been way too sweet to me, to the point where my mouth would pucker every time I would take a sip.However, I have slowly come to appreciate a good dessert wine, especially when paired with the right dessert. Here is my story:

TDH and I have these friends, Liz and Vee, whom we love dearly and whom we always have so much fun going out to dinner with. Unfortunately, they are always super busy so we only get to see them every six months or so. But when we do get to see them we usually go all out and go to some fancy place and drink loads of wine. About a year ago, Liz and Vee took us to the cute little Italian place on California Street in Palo Alto named Spalti. We drank and ate for hours, ordering several bottles of nice wine. At the end of the meal as we were enjoying our dessert the waitress brought us each a glass of sparkling white dessert wine. I took a sip to try to be polite knowing I wouldn’t like it very much and I was blown away. It was the most delicious thing I have ever tasted!

I was fairly convinced that it was a one time deal, my actually liking a dessert wine. Maybe it was the fizz or the fact that it was white instead of red, I don’t know. I never really bothered finding out either as I really haven’t drank much dessert wine since that night.

Well, the other weekend during our trip to Dry Creek Valley we stopped at the Ferarri Carano Winery and sampled some of their dessert wines. They had a white and a red. On my list of all the wines they had available for tasting I put one star next to the white dessert wine, it was too sweet for me. But the Black Muscat dessert wine got two stars. They gave us these chocolate covered grapes to have with the red dessert wine and they really brought out the taste for me. That wine was amazing with those chocolate covered blueberries. It brought me back to the wonderful dinner we had a year ago with our good friends and made me realize maybe I should give dessert wines a second shot.

So for my second Wine With Dinner Thursday event I am featuring a 2006 Rosenblum Black Muscat, Gallagher Reserve. The description on the site says “This fine Black Muscat dessert wine is handcrafted from select plantings of Black Hamburg Muscat grapes. The rich bouquet of exotic berries and spices is very effusive. Flavors of ripe berries, creamy cherries and hints of chocolate are long on the palate.” 

The blueberry chocolate cobbler I made for our Valentine’s Day dessert pairs perfectly with a wine like this. The recipe is below and makes enough for two small individual cobblers.

Enjoy!