And it’s easy. At least that’s what John Larchet tells me. Larchet imports a number of exquisite wines from small producers in Australia, under The Australian Premium Wine Collection umbrella, and a few of them happen to be what the Aussies like to call “stickies,” aka dessert wines.
Now, sometimes dessert wines are meant to stand alone as a sort of liquid dessert, and sometimes they are meant to be paired with the real thing. As we were tasting a few Aussie “stickies” the other day Larchet shared a simple dessert recipe that I believe even I could master, for it requires nothing more than great ingredients. No cooking involved! Some assembly required.
“This is a no-brainer,” he told me. “You need a really good baguette, sliced thin. Then you need some very good fresh ricotta cheese. And the best apricot preserves you can find.
“Spread the cheese on the baguette, add a dollop of apricot preserve and in five minutes you have a whole platter of crowd-pleasing dessert — without any cooking!”
Of course, this dessert would have matched up beautifully with any of the three “stickies” we were tasting — an Elderton Botrytis Semillon (Larchet calls this his creme brulee wine), the Joseph ‘La Magia’ Botrytis, and the Mount Horrocks ‘Cordon Cut’ Riesling — which was Larchet’s point.
And I’m into this slam-dunk crowd-pleasing thing, so I think I may have to give it a try over the holidays!
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