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

Why a Great Sweet Wine Doesn’t Taste Like Syrup

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 27, 2026 | Expand Your Palate, Sweetness, Tasting Tips

Tell someone you like sweet wine and you will often get a slightly pained look. Sweet has a bad reputation: cheap, cloying, a headache in a glass. And bad sweet wine earns it. But a great one is a different thing entirely, intensely sweet and, somehow, refreshing. The trick that separates the two has a name, and once you can taste it you will never judge a sweet wine by its sugar again. The trick is acidity.

Think about lemonade. Sugar alone is just cloying; add lemon and the whole thing comes alive, sweet and tart and refreshing at once. Wine works the same way. Sugar provides the sweetness, acid provides the lift. A sweet wine with low acid is flat and heavy, syrup. A sweet wine with high acid is balanced and bright, no matter how sweet it is. The sugar and the acid hold each other up.

Icewine is the clearest place on earth to taste this, because of how it is made. When the frozen grapes are pressed, the freeze concentrates everything left in the juice: not just the sugar, but the acid too, in the same proportion. So icewine arrives intensely sweet and racing with acid at the same time. That is why it tastes lifted instead of cloying, why a wine this sweet can still finish clean.

So here is the practice. Pour any sweet wine and pay attention to two moments. First, the sweetness as it hits: the honey, the fruit, the weight. Then wait, and notice what happens at the back end. Does the sweetness just sit there, flat and heavy? Or does a wave of acidity arrive and clean it away, leaving your mouth fresh and wanting another sip? That second moment, the lift, is the whole difference between a great sweet wine and a tired one. You are not tasting for sweetness. You are tasting for balance.

It is the same lesson that ran through the whole summer, just at the sweet extreme. Acidity is what made the off-dry Washington wine drinkable, what made the bone-dry Finger Lakes wine sing, and now it is what keeps the sweetest wine of all from collapsing into sugar. Acid is the spine of every white worth drinking, at any level of sweetness.

It is also the engine of this week’s pairings. A wine this sweet can still cut through rich custard and salty cheese, precisely because the acid is doing the cutting. More on Thursday.

SENSORY PAUSE

Taste a sweet wine and count to three after you swallow. If your mouth feels fresh and ready for more, that is the acid lifting the sugar. If it feels heavy and coated, the wine is out of balance. The lift is what you are paying for.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK’S WINE PATH

Sunday → Why Canada is the icewine capital.
Tuesday → Why the sweet finale is not Riesling.

Continue Exploring

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Post Created: Jul 27, 2026

Canada Makes the World’s Icewine Because Its Winters Can Be Trusted

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 26, 2026 | Canada, Expand Your Palate, Niagara Peninsula, Ontario

Icewine sounds like a gimmick until you understand the gamble behind it. You leave the grapes on the vine long after every other grape has been picked, through autumn, into winter, and you wait. You are waiting for a hard freeze, cold enough to freeze the water inside each berry solid while the sugar and acid stay liquid. Then you pick and press the grapes while they are still frozen, and only a few thick, intensely sweet drops run out. The water stays behind as ice. What you catch is the concentrated essence of the fruit.

The catch is the weather. You need a deep, reliable freeze, around minus eight Celsius or colder, at the right moment, with the fruit still healthy on the vine. In most of the world that happens only in the occasional brutal winter, which is why German Eiswein is a rare and expensive lottery. Canada solved the problem by being Canada.

The Niagara Peninsula sits between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment, a long ridge that curves through the region. The lake moderates the season just enough to ripen the fruit, and then winter arrives, dependably and hard, every single year. That combination, a long enough summer and a guaranteed deep freeze, is rare on earth. It made Canada the largest icewine producer in the world, and the Niagara Peninsula its heart.

Reliability changes everything about the wine. Where icewine elsewhere is a now-and-then accident, here it is a craft you can practice and refine every vintage. The result is a wine of startling consistency: intensely sweet, golden, full of apricot, honey, mango and orange marmalade, and, crucially, lifted by a racing acidity that the freeze concentrates right alongside the sugar.

Three steps in, by place and method rather than label:

Affordable: a 375ml Vidal icewine from the broader Niagara Peninsula. Bright apricot and honey, the welcoming way in.
Better: a single-estate icewine, Vidal or Riesling, from a named site such as Niagara-on-the-Lake or the Beamsville Bench. More layered: dried apricot, marmalade, a deeper line of acid.
Luxury: a Riesling icewine or an aged Vidal from a top site, built to keep, where the honey slowly turns toward caramel, dried fruit and saffron over years.

Place comes before packaging, always. Before the grape, before the producer, there is a lake, an escarpment, and a winter you can count on. That dependable freeze is the whole reason this wine exists.

SENSORY PAUSE

Pour a little icewine, very cold, in a small glass. Smell the honey and apricot, then taste, and wait for the lift: a wave of sweetness, then a clean line of acid that cuts straight through it. That cut is the Canadian winter in the glass.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK’S WINE PATH

Monday → Why a great sweet wine doesn’t taste like syrup.
Tuesday → The grape built to hang on through the freeze.

Continue Exploring

If this resonated, you might also enjoy:

Why a Great Sweet Wine Doesn’t Taste Like Syrup

The Grape That Hangs On When Every Other Has Been Picked

The One Rule That Makes Dessert Wine Work

Sipping Through Niagara: Discover New York’s Overlooked Wine Treasure

Same Grape, Colder Place: Why Finger Lakes Riesling Tastes Nothing Like Washington’s

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Post Created: Jul 26, 2026

Three Glasses, One Grape

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 25, 2026 | Expand Your Palate

Here is something worth doing this weekend, and it costs almost nothing in effort. Open three Rieslings side by side and taste a single grape live three different lives.

You have met two of them already: the off-dry Washington wine from a couple of weeks back, peach and lime with a kiss of sweetness, and this week’s bone-dry Finger Lakes, all lime and wet stone and racing acid. Add a sweet one, an icewine or a late-harvest, and the whole spectrum is in front of you. Pour a small measure of each, left to right, dry to sweet, and taste them in turn. The same grape, and yet three completely different wines. You can feel the place and the choice in every glass.

It is the kind of thing that is quietly astonishing, and far better with company. One person notices the Finger Lakes makes their mouth water hardest. Someone else likes the soft edge on the Washington. Nobody has to be right. The point is to taste them together and say what you notice out loud.

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: Jul 25, 2026

The Wine Raw Fish Has Been Waiting For

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 23, 2026 | Expand Your Palate, Niagara Peninsula, Pairings

Raw fish is the hardest thing in the kitchen to find a wine for, because there is so little there to stand up to. No fat to cut, no char, no spice, just clean, cold, delicate flesh and a whisper of the sea. Most whites walk in too heavy. Oak smothers it. Body blankets it. Sweetness fights it. What sashimi wants is a wine that does almost nothing, beautifully.

A bone-dry Finger Lakes or Niagara Riesling is that wine. Think about what it brings: no oak, no weight, no sweetness, just racing acidity and a cold, wet-stone minerality. The acidity does the one thing raw fish needs, which is to reset the palate between bites, the way a squeeze of lemon does, so the second piece tastes as clean as the first. And the wine’s stony, almost saline minerality does something rarer: it mirrors the clean, oceanic flavor of the fish instead of covering it. The match works by agreement and by cutting at once, mineral meeting mineral while the acid keeps everything fresh.

There is one rule that makes or breaks it, and it is the opposite of Washington’s. Two weeks ago, the off-dry wine’s little bit of sugar was the asset; it tamed the salt of prosciutto. Here, with a bone-dry wine, sweetness is the enemy. Keep it off the plate. A little soy or ponzu is fine, even good, but a sweet glaze or a sugary sauce will throw the wine off balance and make all that lovely acid read as sour. Let the fish stay clean and the wine stays singing.

This is where Monday’s lesson pays off. A bone-dry wine this low in alcohol has nothing but its acid to lean on, and that racing acid is exactly what delicate raw fish needs: it resets the palate, bite after bite, so the second piece tastes as clean as the first.

You can read all of this and still be surprised by how clean it feels. Take a slice of fish, a touch of soy, then a cold sip. The wine wipes the palate, mirrors the sea, and asks for the next piece. That is the whole argument, and like most of them, it lands in your mouth before your head catches up.

It is the kind of clean, precise match that is easier to notice in company, with a second glass on the table and someone catching the same thing a beat after you. That is most of what the Monthly Table is.

Recipe

Sashimi Platter

Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor

A no-cook platter of pristine raw fish with daikon, shiso, wasabi and pickled ginger. The whole skill is buying well, slicing clean, and keeping everything cold.

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Prep Time 20

Total Time 20

Course Appetizer, Main Course

Cuisine Japanese

Servings

Ingredients

About 1 lb sushi-grade fish salmon, tuna, and yellowtail or hamachi, very fresh
Daikon radish finely shredded
Shiso leaves or microgreens
Prepared wasabi
Pickled ginger
Soy sauce or ponzu
Optional: thin-sliced cucumber toasted sesame seeds

Instructions

Keep the fish thoroughly chilled until the last moment. Use only sushi-grade fish from a trusted source.
With a very sharp knife, slice the fish across the grain into clean quarter-inch slices, wiping the blade between cuts.
Make a bed of shredded daikon and shiso on a chilled platter.
Fan the slices over the bed. Add small mounds of wasabi and pickled ginger, and the cucumber and sesame if using.
Serve immediately, cold, with soy or ponzu alongside.

Notes

Cold is not optional. A chilled platter and cold fish are the difference between clean and tired.
Slicing across the grain gives the clean, silky texture. A dull knife tears; a sharp one glides.
Keep added sweetness to a minimum. A little soy is right; sweet sauces fight a crisp wine.

Wines That Love This Dish

Raw fish wants a wine that refreshes and gets out of the way. A bone-dry, high-acid white is the move: a Finger Lakes or Niagara Riesling is the standout, its acidity resetting the palate between bites and its wet-stone minerality mirroring the clean, oceanic flavor, with no oak or sweetness to smother the fish.

Keyword how to make sashimi at home, sashimi platter, sushi grade fish

Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!

SENSORY PAUSE

Take a slice of fish with a little soy, then a cold sip of bone-dry Riesling. Notice the acid lift the fish and reset your mouth, and the wine’s stony note echo the clean sea flavor. That clean reset is the pairing working.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK’S WINE PATH

The platter → A no-cook sashimi platter, start to finish.
Tuesday → Why this wine is built to cut and refresh.

Continue Exploring

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The Wine Grows Where Winter Should Kill It

What the Alcohol Number Is Quietly Telling You

Same Grape, Colder Place: Why Finger Lakes Riesling Tastes Nothing Like Washington’s

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Post Created: Jul 23, 2026

Same Grape, Colder Place: Why Finger Lakes Riesling Tastes Nothing Like Washington’s

by Anne Kjellgren @ Food Wine and Flavor | Jul 21, 2026 | Expand Your Palate, Finger Lakes, Riesling

If you have read the Riesling guide here, you know the grape barely has a personality of its own. It reports the place it grew instead of flavouring it. Two weeks ago we tasted that idea in Washington. This week we taste it in New York, and the two wines could not be more different. Same grape. Two climates. The gap between them is the whole lesson.

Washington grows its Riesling in a warm, sun-drenched high desert behind the Cascades. The fruit ripens fully and generously, so the wine comes out riper and rounder: peach and apricot and lime, with a kiss of sweetness, the gentle off-dry style that tames salt and spice at the table. Warm place, generous wine.

The Finger Lakes does the opposite. It is cold and marginal: glacial lakes, shale slopes, a short hard summer. The fruit never fully softens, the sugar stays low, the acid stays screaming. So the wine is bone-dry, lean and cutting: lime, green apple and underripe peach over wet stone, with no sweetness at all and an acidity that races. Cold place, austere wine.

Here is the principle worth carrying out of the week. Warmth gives you ripeness and roundness. Cold gives you acid and cut. Move the same grape to a colder, more marginal place and the fruit pulls back while the acid steps forward. It is true far beyond Riesling; it is why cool-climate anything tends to taste leaner and racier than its warm-climate twin. But Riesling shows it most plainly, because the grape adds so little of its own that the climate is almost all you taste.

Neither is better. They are answers to different questions at the table. The off-dry Washington wine is the one for a little heat or a salty-sweet plate. The bone-dry Finger Lakes wine is the one for raw fish, oysters, anything where you want the wine to cut, refresh, and then get out of the way. Which brings us to Thursday.

READ NEXT IN THIS WEEK’S WINE PATH