Wine has been in Richard Vayda’s life since his grandparents owned a beer and wine warehouse, and their enterprising 15-year-old grandson started making his own wine in his bedroom, using vats full of grape concentrate. After operating his own restaurants in New York and Connecticut, Vayda joined the faculty at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education in 2000 and soon became the school’s Director of Wine and Beverage Studies. At ICE, he teaches courses in how to pair the proper wines with desserts.
Tell us about the dessert and beverage course you’ve taught at ICE.
It’s a class in matching wines with desserts for the public and our students. I also work with budding chefs and restaurateurs in the field of culinary management. Many of them are interested in opening bakeries and pastry shops, so I do tastings with them. They bring in several desserts, so we look into pairings for those.
Are customers becoming more interested in pairings than they used to be?
I think there is more interest in wine and how it pairs with food, both in savory and pastry. You just have to look at the explosions of wine bars. People are more interested in pairing wines with specific foods and desserts. I notice this in my own time dining with friends. I never order just one wine. I may order a bottle of something and a glass of something else to explore the contrast and what goes better with what, and we all have fun discussing.
How do you go about pairing?
I look at a few key things. First I consider what is the main ingredient. I look at the weight of it, the texture of it, the taste and the flavor profile – making a distinction between those last two. Then I look at the method of cooking. If the main ingredient in a dessert is a fruit, it could be a poached pear, a baked pair, a grilled pear, and that’s going to change how you approach the pairing for it.
With a cake, for example, you could have a simple genoise with vanilla, but it could also taste very complex. If you use a dark chocolate, that can have a machine gun effect on the intensity.
Then, what other modifying kind of ingredient that accents it or could even be an element of the main ingredient. And then I look at the overall intensity and balance. Then I look at the beverage.
When you look at food groups for desserts, I look at fruit, fresh fruit, vanilla, chocolate, caramel and then look at textures – creamy vs. crunchy.
Let’s talk specifics. What would you pair with a poached pear pair as opposed to a baked pear or a grilled pear?
You want to pair fresh with fresh, light with light, heavy with heavy. If you have a simple pear shortcake, you might consider a sparkling Moscato, a light Moscato d’Asti. If it’s a poached pear in a vanilla syrup, then I would look for something that goes with the richer, but still fresh, cleaner nature of it, such as a Muscat Beaumes-de-Venise with the poached pear and vanilla syrup. If it’s baked, we have a little caramelization, so we could have a fortified wine, maybe a Jerez, a sherry with some dried fruit notes in it — A Pedro Ximenez. There are other things accenting it also. With a grilled fruit dessert, you’d want something to go more with the dark, smokiness of it.
You also see a lot of grilled pineapple, for instance.
Exactly, so maybe a darker, heavier wine to pair with something wooded. Going back to Jerez again – perhaps a sweet Oloroso. Some Madeiras would also work, to accent more of those smoky notes and pair with the acidity of the fruit.
What would you pair with something cream or heavy, such as cheesecake or crème brulee?
Something that goes with the classic brulee. It’s really the perfect dessert. You have that creamy texture accented by the brulee top. So you need something to stand up to the richness. Again, it could be a Jerez with caramel notes, but maybe a late harvest, a Riesling or trunken Beerenauslese — maybe a little noble rot there.
In Austria, my wife and I saw them pair Riesling with a sacher torte, and I thought, what do you not pair with Riesling?
Well it’s a very flexible grape because you can have all different ripeness levels, good also for savory foods, something salty with something off-dry to drink. And that would go well with a lighter dessert that maybe had a salt component to it. A salt-accented pastry or a salted nut or something.
When people pair drinks with chocolate, they’d probably think of traditional pairings such as coffees and ports. Are they missing anything?
Oh, of course those work. I just did a tasting; a three-chocolate dessert with caramel and toasted nuts. I paired it with a Pedro Ximenez Jerez made with dried grapes, wood solerna aged, giving a bit of a bitter edge to go with the nuts. It was a perfect pairing to go with the chocolate and the caramel. You could also go with something that is not a traditional Porto, but maybe an American Zinfandel Porto, especially if there is a spicy nature as a modifier to the dessert. Maybe dried Grenache from southern France, so you get that red fruit component, but also the intensity that you’d like. Chocolate is very tricky.
You mentioned spice. What would you pair with something spicy?
Well you have to think of the intensity of the spice. You’d look for wine that has a spicy component to it. I’d go back to the dried grenache, a Zinfandel port, late-harvest Petite Sirah, late-harvest Malbecs. Some sparkling Syrahs could pair well.
What if you had something that could be sour, such as a key lime pie or a strong lemon dessert?
You want to match the acidity; otherwise the wine will seem rather flat. Try a grape like Riesling, not too ripe, so it has a nice acidity. If you grated some rind into the dessert, that might add something bitter. To get some earthiness to it, especially if the citrus is cooked, maybe you’d want an off-dry champagne to match the complexity of the dessert. The general rule is that the wine should be at least as sweet, if not sweeter than, the dessert.
Conversely, what about a dessert that is light, without a bitter element to it; something tropical?
To match the tropical, you could go with a late-harvest Viognier or late-harvest Sauvignon Blanc, also which tend to have one of those tropical notes to them, papaya and so on.
If you served crepes Suzette or another dessert that already had an alcohol component, even a simple rum cake, what would you pair with those?
You could pair it with the alcohol used in the dish, say a Grand Marnier with the crepes. Wines would most likely be outgunned by the liquor in the dessert. You could look for a wine with dried grapes to match that intensity, but better to go with what’s in the dish.
If you had something fried, such as churros and beignets, what would you pair and would the sweetness level even be a consideration because the dessert is fried?
Well that’s when I’d go with a sparkler – you know, think of Champagne and french fries. I would go with an off-dry, a demi-sec or something.
Champagne is sometimes passed out before the meal at parties, and so on. Can it be a good pairing for pastry?
Well, you’re going to look for an off-dry wine. There are also sparkling Reislings that are off-dry. For reds there are sparkling Shirazes, sparkling Malbecs. Also a Lambrusco, either an Amiblile, the slightly sweet version or the dolce, the sweeter ones. Those are often overlooked and would work with a pastry that had berries.
What about spirits?
Well, there’s a plethora of liqueurs that are fruit or nut based. So I would look for similar components. You could go with dry liquors such as bourbon, which has a sweetness to it. That could pair with, say, a walnut cake that isn’t too sweet. If the cake has a sweet buttercream with it, then you have to start thinking of a bourbon liqueur to go with that.
When you made desserts for your restaurants, did you have any with alcohol?
I sometimes imbibed a cake with an alcohol component. I did often make a gingerbread pumpkin with cranberry trifle and I did use ginger liqueur in the gingerbread, as well as regularly using some liqueur in the whipped cream garnish.
If you have a plated dessert with a lot of textures and flavors almost fighting one another, is there a beverage that is almost neutral enough to cover those elements?
Do you have a bottle of Rose handy? The compromise wine. Kidding, of course.
What wines might be undiscovered or not so well known that could pair with certain desserts?
When we do pairings here at ICE, I think people are always surprised by a drink like Madeira. It just has such beautiful complexities to go with caramel or chocolate or roasted nuts. Maybe a sparkling wine that people don’t know about such as Clairette de Die in the Rhone Valley. I don’t think people use sparkling wines enough with desserts.
What is a cliche we need to get rid of?
Champagne and chocolate. I should start by saying taste is very personal, who you are, your food history, what you ate when you were young, but keep in mind that your preferences change over time.
Is temperature a consideration, such as an ice cream or parfait on the one hand; and hot souffle on the other?
I believe you have to think of the temperature of the dessert and mirror it. Cold beverage with a cold dessert; room temperature with a warm dessert. Of course sometimes contrast works. What makes warm apple pie and ice cream so good? It’s that contrast in temperature. Those work sometimes, but they’re a little trickier. It’s easier to go along with the natural properties of dessert with the beverage.
So you can certainly employ contrasts. What makes a salted nut roll so good? Well, you have the contrast of the sweet and salt, but it’s more than that. It’s not just sugar versus salt; it’s toasted nut that makes it richer versus caramel – not simply sugar. That underlying similar intensity works so well. It’s like blue cheese with Sauterne. They’re both rich. But you wouldn’t want to do a rich, dense cheesecake with a simple Moscato d’Asti. Now if it was a ricotta whipped cheesecake that had a very light texture, maybe that could work, but you need to think about that overlying intensity.
(This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)
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