Halloween Candy Favorites paired to Beer & Wine

October has already been a jam packed month filled with Perfect Pairings, beer, wine bootcamps, classes – with more to come!
Because we are just weeks away from one of my favorite October dates, Halloween, I wanted to share some of my favorite ‘sweet tooth’ pairings from this past week’s SWEET RETREAT class, ending our Beer and Wine University series. Again, another great turn out, loaded with fabulous pairings and delicious bevis to pair!
With Halloween comes two of my favorite ‘past time’ candies – Carmel Apples and Candy Corn. With that said, we were sure to add both of these candied desserts to our Sweet Retreat Beer and Wine Pairings class this week. Generally speaking, when you get into a super sticky situation like candy, the old school rule for pairing wine to sweets, is to be sure that your beverage is one degree sweeter than the dessert. For example, pairing to a flour-less chocolate torte does not mean that Port is your answer. In a situation like this, something more rich, fuller bodied, with a bit of alcohol and (sometimes with a bit residual sugar left behind) is your answer. Chilean Cabernet and California Zinfandel are often times nice solutions to chocolaty desserts.
When it came down to the Carmel Apple and Candy Corn sweets, using this rule can be tricky because both desserts are truly over the top SWEET, right? The Carmel Apple we used in our sweets class, compliments of Taste Bud Tart’s Ms. Molly Hermann, was a perfectly cute Minnesota apple wrapped in a goat’s milk caramel. I selected the Kermit Lynch Tintero Moscato d’Asti. I actually LOVE using Italian Moscatos for the dessert category when the sweet is exceptionally sticky. The bubbles end up acting like little ‘scrubbing bubbles’ while the sweetness and the clean cut (of this particular Moscato) acts as a brightening agent to the dessert. Not the mention, the apple/pear notes of the wine and the fruit were a perfect pairing to one another.
Second, Candy Corn – what to do with Candy Corn, right? My Beer BFF and libation partner in crime, Michael Agnew of A Perfect Pint, paired a delicious English Bitter to the Halloween corn, rhyming perfectly to the creamy butterscotch’d notes of the candy, making the combo very round and smooth. The Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter was a lovely combination of acidity and cream, all at one.
With this past time Halloween favorite, I chose a very inexpensive cream sherry from Jerez, Spain. (Osborne Oloroso Sherry) Now from a mind’s eye, the combo almost seems as if the two wouldn’t match being that the Cream Style Oloroso Sherry is sweet and the candy corn also uber sweet, yet somehow the sweet on super sweet made sense. Perking up the bits of caramel and intense butterscotch flavors of the candy – my palate was (secretly) in heaven!
The old school rules used to tell you to stay away from certain desserts, wine pairings, combos – but the new school rules say PAIR to IT ALL and so do I. Something that I teach often and also practice myself is: experiment, experiment, experiment. You have to try it to believe it sometimes, but most importantly, find what’s right for you. Besides, it’s fun to try these pairings yourself…and try ‘em all, you might just find the Perfect Pairing in your (or your kids’) Halloween buckets this season!