Bonny Doon Vin de Glaciere Moscato
price: $16-$18 for a 375ml bottle
suggested food pairings: sweet fruit based desserts, cakes, pastry, candy, sharp and flavorful cheeses

This wine breaks our “under $15 per bottle,” rule, but I don’t care. It’s some of the most delicious wine that will ever pass your lips with dessert. Dessert wines, as a category, are a tough sell, and therefore must try harder to get attention. Any time a wine has to try harder, that’s good news for the consumer because prices are kept down while quality is kept high. They hope a cheap and tasty wine will eventually get noticed and have a broader recognition so they can increase production and prices to make more money. This wine even goes so far as to make the label look like lingerie to get noticed… it works for me.

Bonny Doon’s Vin de Glaciere has been around awhile. I had it on one of my wine lists 12 or more years ago. I am pleased to report it is just as delicious today as the first time I sampled it. It’s actually a pseudo-ice-wine. They pick the grapes at their peak acidity, freeze them, and immediately crush the lot to separate out the syrupy juice. The idea is to capture the majority of the water in the grape in ice, allowing the sugars to become exponentially more concentrated. A true ice wine does this in cold climates on the vine, or naturally. Bonny Doon’s method has several advantages including better control over the process by taking the elements out of the equation, and the final product has much higher acidic complexity for the price because the grapes didn’t stay on the vine for the two or three extra months when acid generally dissipates.

A clear yellow viscosity blankets the inside of the glass and positively simmers with a heady nose of floral apricot, pineapple and honey. These olfactory attributes directly morph into flavors on the tongue. As expected, a commanding citrus peel acid lances the entire elixir through and through, to the point of helpless distraction. The acid shoulders the entire fruit carnival much as Atlas hoisted the globe, marching across your palate willfully, yet with generous benevolence. Don’t walk past a bottle of this again without carrying one home to have with, or as, your dessert.

Craig Pierce can be reached at craig_l_pierce[at]hotmail[dot]com.