What dessert is best with 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.