Weddings & Wine

Wedding Desserts

Wedding Desserts and Wine Pairings 101

So you're getting married? It's a very exciting time – a lot of planning and budgeting, a plethora of details to attend to – and you want to get everything just right.

Food and wine play an important role in a wedding, often reflecting the tastes of the couple themselves. Your food and wine choices will help create the feeling of your wedding, and since most brides- and grooms-to-be want to personalize their big day, most are seeking innovative ideas that provide a unique and memorable experience for their guests and themselves.

More and more, dessert is becoming a centerpiece for the entire wedding menu as brides and grooms are thinking beyond the traditional wedding cake. There is a strong tradition of serving a sparkling wine (champagne) with dessert and wedding cake, but as today's couples look for unique desserts, they are also looking for alternatives to sparkling wine. For many reasons, this makes sense: Wedding budgets can be tight, and you're looking for ways to do more with less; or your favorite dessert might not pair well with sparkling wine. Whatever the reason, we have some innovative ideas for pairing desserts with our fruit-forward Mirassou wines.

We asked David Katz, food and wine pairing instructor at the Culinary Institute of America, and managing partner of Panevino, Food for Wine, Napa Valley's premier caterer, for his best thinking on pairing wedding desserts with wine. Here's what Chef Katz had to say:

A very well-accepted rule of thumb for dessert and wine pairing is: the wine should be as sweet, if not sweeter, than the dessert item with which it is paired.

Consumers are quickly adapting to newer thinking about food and wine pairing (e.g. you don't have to pair white meat with white wine, red meat with red wine), but the idea of sweet food with sweet wine, and savory food with drier wine, is rooted in hundreds of years of pragmatic trial and error.

Mirassou Riesling has both the sweetness and lively mouthfeel to make it an excellent choice for wedding desserts and cakes instead of a sparkling wine, and it can also be served with appetizers as well as lunch or dinner, making it very budget friendly.

Wedding Desserts & Wine Pairings 101:

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Our Mirassou® Monterey County Riesling is made in a bright, fruit-forward style that pairs well with a variety of wedding desserts.

Featured Wine: Riesling

Featured Wine: Cabernet Sauvignon