What dessert is best with champagne?

Is it possible to present complementary Champagnes with the dessert menu. I have always been an advocate of serving Champagne with all elements of a meal, but when it comes to the dessert the pairing can be disastrous. The greatest enemy to Champagne is sugar, so to get the Champagne and dessert in harmony we need to consider the balance of sugar. One approach to pairing desserts and Champagnes is to look at desserts that get their sweetness from butter, cream or pastry cream instead of their level of sugar. A further avenue to find a perfect pairing is to choose a dessert that complements the Champagne’s delicate flavours. When we look at the red grape Champagnes, such as Perrier-Jouët Blason rosé with notes of red fruit, we can combine them with desserts containing strawberries, raspberries and cherries, whether that’s classic strawberries and cream, cherry tart or a raspberry cheesecake. Chocolate is the ingredient that every Champagne house avoids like the plague, so imagine my concern when I was told I was presenting Champagnes at a Mothering Sunday event with a chocolate brand. I then looked for chocolate where the contents would complement the delicate flavours in the Champagne, and found that a raspberry white chocolate paired with a rosé Champagne with its red fruit aromas. So when you next conclude your meal with a burst of sweetness from a dessert, you can now be confidant that you can pair it with a Champagne.

Champagne is adored all over the world for its elegance, distinctive flavour and value as a food pairing. It’s the former trait that makes it an ideal pairing for cream and butter-based desserts. Panna cotta is a particular highlight, but any fruit-based desert like tarts or crepes can work beautifully too. Perhaps surprisingly, shortbread biscuits are also ideally suited to Champagne pairing also, thanks to the acidity of Champagne cutting through the at-times overly rich butter of the shortbread biscuits. With the majority of rosé wines enjoying a delightfully dry palate, they make a remarkable pairing with a great many dishes. In regards to dessert, sparkling rosé doesn’t suit cream-based desserts, but it does balance beautifully with chocolate – the darker the better. Dark chocolate cakes work beautifully with sparkling rosé, as do chocolate-covered fruits. English sparkling wines have enjoyed a huge uptick in popularity in recent years, and for good reason – their quality has been rising consistently, pushing the old guard to up their own game. With similar characteristics to Champagne and produced in a similar manner with yeast staying in the bottle to ferment further, it shares many of the same dessert pairings, suiting cream and milk-based desserts expertly. Franciacorta boasts the same production method as Champagne and many of the same grapes used, however, the warmer weather in Franciacorta, Italy, ensure that the wine is lacking in the zest and minerality of Champagne. Cheesecakes are a favourite pairing with Franciacorta sparkling wines, as are Gelato ice creams – an Italian staple which benefits greatly from the cool, refreshing acidity of the Franciacorta wines.