Wine Fair
Audience: Public, Trade
Date: Tuesday 18 January 2011
Venue: Grand Ballroom, Ritz-Carlton
Street: Midtown, 9-7-1, Akasaka, Minato-ku
Town/City: Tokyo, Japan

Famously among my friends, I am not very interested in drinking stickily sweet wines. Tasting them is fine, but wade through a gloopy glassful? I would rather have another glass of red, please. Or a knickerbocker glory, if only for the joy of asking for it. But every so often, along comes one for which I will make an exception. Domaine Gardrat Pineau des Charentes Reserve (£18.50 for 75cl, yapp.co.uk; 17% abv) was hand-delivered to my flat by Tom of Yapp Brothers because he lives in the next street.

There are no hard-and-fast rules in matching wine to food these days, of course, which is why I regularly champion Portuguese red with salt cod (really) or fine white burgundy with cheesy chips (not). But there is one tradition that holds up: match sweet food with sweet wine. Always. That includes high-acid, fresh fruit desserts. Dry rosé or brut champagne taste quite stripped down and sour next to anything remotely sugary. Indeed, the pairing of dry wine with sweet food is still a horribly common crime, occurring most frequently, m’lud, in a domestic setting during the hot-weather months.