Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor, Author at Food Wine and Flavor

How to Read an Italian Wine Label (Without Knowing Italian)

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Aug 3, 2026 | Expand Your Palate, Wine Fundamentals

French wine is confusing because the label names a place and expects you to already know what grows there. Italian wine is confusing for a different reason: the label often names a place, a method, and a tier of quality all at once, stacked into a single word.

Valpolicella is the clearest possible teaching example, because the ladder is short and the words are almost self-explanatory once you know what to listen for.

Valpolicella on its own is the base wine: light, everyday, meant to be opened without ceremony. Add the word Ripasso and you are looking at a wine that has been passed back over spent Amarone skins for extra weight and depth. Amarone on its own means the grapes were dried for months before fermenting at all, concentrating everything the vine produced into something dense, warm, and built to sit with a meal for an hour. Recioto, a fourth word worth knowing, uses the same dried-grape method but stops the fermentation early, leaving the wine sweet.

One grape family. Four labels. Each word describing a different decision the winemaker made about time.

SENSORY PAUSE

Next time an Italian label looks like a wall of unfamiliar words, try this: find the region first, usually the largest word. Then look for a second word describing a method or a tier, appassimento, riserva, classico, superiore. That second word is doing more work than the grape name ever would.

This habit generalizes past Valpolicella. Chianti, arriving in two weeks, uses the same logic: a place name, then a tier (Classico, Riserva, Gran Selezione) that tells you how the wine was made and how long it rested before release. Learning to read one Italian label well means the next one gets easier, not harder.

The point of this is not memorization. It is noticing that a label is a small, dense paragraph, and most of what it says is available to anyone willing to read past the first word.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK'S WINE PATH

→ Veneto: One Grape, Three Escalating Stories (Sunday)

→ Corvina and the Appassimento Method (Tuesday)

→ Ripasso and Red Wine-Braised Short Ribs (Thursday)

Continue Exploring

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Post Created: Aug 3, 2026

Veneto: One Grape, Three Escalating Stories

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Aug 2, 2026 | Expand Your Palate, Northern Italy, Veneto

There is a stretch of country north of Verona, low hills between the city and Lake Garda, where a single family of red grapes does something most wine regions do not attempt. It makes three different wines, at three different intensities, from largely the same fruit.

The lightest is called Valpolicella. Simple, cherry-bright, meant for a weeknight table. The richest is Amarone, dried for months until the grapes shrivel toward raisin, the sugars concentrating into something dark, warm, and nearly sixteen percent alcohol. And in between sits the wine most useful to actually understand, because it explains the other two: Ripasso.

Ripasso means “re-passed.” After Amarone finishes fermenting, the winemaker does not throw away the skins it leaves behind. Those skins still hold flavor, tannin, and the concentrated character of the drying process. Young Valpolicella is passed back over them, a second fermentation begins, and the wine that emerges has picked up weight, dried-cherry depth, and a gentle warmth it did not have before. It is sometimes called “baby Amarone,” and the nickname earns its keep. All the character, less of the intensity, and a fraction of the price.

SENSORY PAUSE

Pour a Ripasso and let it sit for a minute before tasting. The nose gives cherry and a note of raisin, almost sweet. The first sip corrects that impression: dry, structured, warmed at the edges rather than sweetened. That gap between what the glass promises and what it delivers is worth noticing on its own.

The grape underneath all three wines is Corvina, usually blended with small amounts of Rondinella and sometimes Corvinone. None of these names show up prominently on the label, which is the first lesson of the Italian arc this week is opening: Italian wine is usually named for a place and a method, not a grape. Understanding Valpolicella means understanding a hillside and a process before it means memorizing a varietal.

Veneto itself is one of Italy’s most productive wine regions, stretching from the Alps down to the Adriatic, and Valpolicella is only one corner of it. But it is the corner that teaches the most in one glass: how drying grapes, rather than picking them earlier or later, becomes its own route to concentration. The same idea showed up in Alsace and again in Niagara last week, reached by two entirely different mechanisms. Here, the mechanism is time and air.

This week follows that thread through three stops: what the label is actually telling you, why the grape behaves this way when dried, and what happens when Ripasso meets a slow-braised plate built to match it.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK'S WINE PATH

→ How to Read an Italian Wine Label (Monday)

→ Corvina and the Appassimento Method (Tuesday)

→ Ripasso and Red Wine-Braised Short Ribs (Thursday)

Continue Exploring

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Post Created: Aug 2, 2026

Sweet Wine and Blue Cheese: The Pairing That Sounds Wrong and Isn’t

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Aug 1, 2026 | Blue Cheese, Expand Your Palate, Pairings, Sweetness

Thursday was sweet meeting sweet. Today is the opposite, and it might be even better: sweet meeting salty. Pour an intensely sweet icewine next to a wedge of pungent blue cheese, gorgonzola, Roquefort, a good Canadian blue, and something that sounds like a mistake turns into a revelation.

It works on pure contrast. Blue cheese is salty, funky and sharp, almost aggressive. Icewine is sweet, honeyed and lush. Each one softens the other’s extreme. The wine’s sugar tames the cheese’s salt and funk, rounding off its sharp edges, and the cheese’s salt and savour keep the wine from feeling too sweet. They meet in the middle, and the middle is delicious. It is the same principle behind the old classic of Sauternes and Roquefort, a reliable truth dressed in Canadian clothes.

Make it a small plate. A wedge of gorgonzola, a handful of walnuts for crunch and a little bitterness, a spoon of honeycomb to bridge the wine and the cheese, and, if you like, a few dried apricots that echo the wine’s own fruit. A tiny pour of icewine alongside. It is a five-minute spread that tastes like an occasion.

And if you have followed the summer, this is the place to close it. Open the off-dry Washington, the bone-dry Finger Lakes, and this sweet Niagara icewine, and taste them in a row, dry to sweet. One journey, three glasses, the whole spectrum of what sweetness can be in a wine. Better, of course, with someone across the table.

Wine was never a solitary thing. It is an ingredient in an evening, and the evening is better shared.

Savour the good stuff.

Continue Exploring

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Post Created: Aug 1, 2026

The One Rule That Makes Dessert Wine Work

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 30, 2026 | Expand Your Palate, Pairings

There is one rule for pairing wine with dessert, and almost everyone breaks it. It is this: the wine has to be sweeter than the plate. Break it, even slightly, and you will wreck a beautiful wine.

Here is why. Sweetness is relative. Put a sweet wine next to something sweeter, a frosted cake, a sugary tart, and the wine suddenly tastes thin, sour and stripped, all its lovely fruit gone, because your palate is grading it against the dessert and finding it short. The exact same wine, beside something less sweet, tastes rich, honeyed and generous. The wine did not change. The plate moved the goalposts. So the move is always to keep the dessert a step less sweet than the wine, and let the wine be the sweetest thing on the table.

Crème brûlée is the ideal partner precisely because it is restrained. A good one is not very sweet at all; it is mostly rich vanilla custard under a thin, bittersweet shard of caramelized sugar. That leaves plenty of room above it for an intensely sweet icewine to sit as the star. And then two things happen at once. The custard’s vanilla and cream find an echo in the icewine’s honeyed weight, like meeting like, comfort meeting comfort. And the wine’s racing acidity slices through the richness of the cream, so each spoonful and sip resets instead of building toward too much. Sweetness mirrored, richness cut. That is the whole pairing.

This is where Monday’s lesson pays off. A wine this sweet could easily have buried a delicate custard in sugar. It does not, because the freeze concentrated the acid right alongside the sweetness, and that acid is what keeps the match lifted instead of leaden. Without it, two sweet, rich things would collapse into one heavy thing. With it, they stay distinct and bright.

You can read all of this and still be surprised by how clean it feels. Crack the sugar, take a spoon of custard, then a small sip of cold icewine. The custard turns silkier, the wine turns brighter, and the whole thing lifts. That click is the rule working in real time, and like most of them, it lands in your mouth before your head catches up.

It is the kind of small revelation that is easier to notice in company, with a tiny glass each and someone catching the same lift a beat after you. That is most of what the Monthly Table is.

Recipe

Creme brulee in a white ramekin. A spoon dips into the creamy golden custard with broken shards of cirispy caramel.

Vanilla Crème Brûlée

Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor

Silky vanilla custard under a crackling caramel crust. Make-ahead, just five ingredients, and the only trick is a gentle water bath and a steady hand with the torch.

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Prep Time 15

Cook Time 35

Chilling Time 4

Total Time 4 50

Course Dessert

Cuisine French

Servings to 6

Ingredients

2 cups heavy cream
1 vanilla bean split, or 2 tsp vanilla extract
5 large egg yolks
1/3 cup granulated sugar plus extra for the tops
Pinch of salt

Instructions

Heat the oven to 325°F. Warm the cream with the vanilla until steaming, then take it off the heat and let it steep 10 minutes.
Whisk the yolks, the 1/3 cup sugar and the salt until pale. Slowly pour the warm cream into the yolks, whisking constantly, so the eggs temper rather than scramble.
Strain into ramekins set in a baking dish. Pour hot water into the dish, halfway up the ramekins, to make a water bath.
Bake 30 to 40 minutes, until just set with a slight jiggle in the center.
Cool, then chill at least 4 hours, or overnight.
Just before serving, sprinkle a thin, even layer of sugar over each, and torch or broil until the sugar caramelizes. Let it set a minute, until the crust hardens.

Notes

The water bath is not optional. It is what keeps the custard silky instead of curdled.
A real vanilla bean is lovely, but good extract is honestly fine.
Keep the dessert restrained if you are pairing it with a sweet wine. The wine should be the sweetest thing on the table.

Wines That Love This Dish

This custard wants a sweet wine that is sweeter than it is, with enough acid to cut the cream. An icewine is the standout: its honeyed apricot mirrors the vanilla while its racing acidity slices the richness, and it stays a step sweeter than the dessert, exactly as the rule demands.

Keyword crème brûlée recipe, easy crème brûlée, vanilla custard dessert

Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!

SENSORY PAUSETake a spoon of crème brûlée, then a small sip of icewine. Notice the wine taste even richer beside the custard, because the custard is the less sweet of the two, and the acid clean the cream away. That lift is the rule made real.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK’S WINE PATH

The recipe → Vanilla crème brûlée, make-ahead.
Saturday → The other great icewine move: blue cheese.

Continue Exploring

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The Grape That Hangs On When Every Other Has Been Picked

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 28, 2026 | Dessert Wines, Expand Your Palate, Vidal

For two weeks we followed Riesling, dry to off-dry, and I promised the sweet end of the journey was coming. Here it is, and it arrives with a small confession: this week’s wine is not Riesling at all. It is Vidal, and the reason why is the whole story.

To make icewine, the grapes have to survive on the vine for months after every other grape has been picked, hanging there through frost and snow and the first hard freezes, without rotting, dropping or shrivelling to nothing. That is brutal on a grape. Most noble varieties, Riesling included, can do it, but it is risky: thin skins split, birds and rot take their share, and a sudden warm spell can ruin the crop. Vidal is built for exactly this. It is a French-American hybrid, bred for cold-hardiness, with thick skins that resist rot and cling to the vine through the worst of winter. It is, quite literally, the grape that hangs on.

That toughness is why Vidal became the classic Niagara icewine grape. It delivers the freeze reliably, with high acid and generous fruit, exactly the apricot, honey and marmalade profile icewine wants. Riesling icewine exists too, and it is prized, more delicate, more age-worthy, with that flinty Riesling line, but it is the riskier, costlier choice. Vidal is the dependable workhorse that turned Canadian icewine from a rare wonder into an everyday one.

Here is the point worth carrying out of the whole arc. We treat the grape as the headline, but at the sweet extreme the method and the place are the real authors. Icewine is defined by the freeze, not the variety. Two different grapes, Riesling and Vidal, can both make it, and the wine tastes more like the technique than like either grape. Sometimes the useful question is not “what grape,” it is “what was done to it, and where.”

Like rosé or sparkling wines, icewine is about the wine style - rather than being specific to any one grape.

So the summer’s three wines are not one grape three ways. They are three points on a single spectrum of sweetness: off-dry Washington Riesling, bone-dry Finger Lakes Riesling, and this, sweet Niagara Vidal. One idea, sweetness as a choice shaped by place and method, traced from one end to the other.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK’S WINE PATH