Wine to Dine – April 2022 – Bad Girl Bakery

Good egg Peter Ranscombe pairs five wines with recipes from Bad Girl Bakery.

CHECK out the recipes from Bad Girl Bakery in the printed or digital versions of Scottish Field’s magazine food feature and then grab your apron.

Once those sweet treats are cooling on their racks, it’s time to think about the accompanying wines.

Sweet wines are much maligned – the best examples balance sweetness and freshness to create bottles that aren’t just good sweet wines but good wines, full stop.

I had great fun testing 130-plus examples for Decanter magazine last year.

Here, I’ve picked the best pairings for those sweet treats from Bad Girl Bakery.

MOUNT HORROCKS CORDON CUT CLARE VALLEY RIESLING 2021
Hedonism Wines
£29.70 for 375ml
Zingy freshness and sweeter spun sugar make this Australian riesling a delicious mouthful to match muffins. Watch out for another excellent example of a sweet riesling in next month’s Wine to Dine column…

MOLLY DOOKER SPARKLING SHIRAZ 2019
Great Grog
£24.49
This red Australian fizz combines lively bubbles with dark fruits, sweet spices, and enough freshness to pair with posh banana bread. Sparkling shiraz is a great talking point to get a party started – so few people have tried sweet red wines, let along a sweet and sparkling shiraz, a grape that’s better known for producing powerful table reds in Australia.

CERETTO MOSCATO D’ASTI 2020
Harvey Nichols
£21.00
A lighter Italian wine with attractive floral aromas and expressive lemon curd flavours to accompany the layer cake. Moscato d’Asti is often jokingly called “the ideal breakfast wine” thanks to its low alcohol content, usually around the 5% mark. It’s so unusual that it’s one of the few exceptions built into the European Union’s wine laws, which define wine as being above 8.5% alcohol by volume.

CLINE LATE HARVEST MOURVEDRE 2017
The Whisky Exchange
£20.95 for 375ml
Grown-up tiffin calls for a grown-up wine. This Californian alternative to port is full of warming dark chocolate notes. Mourvedre is better known as one of the blending components in the Rhone Valley in the South of France, although it does pop up on its own as monastrell in Spain and as mataro in Australia, where again it forms a blending grape with grenache and shiraz in “GSM” blends.

BANFI ROSA REGALE BRACHETTO D’ACQUI
Flagship Wines
£18.79
Despite its pale hue, this Tuscan fizz has enough red fruit flavours to match cranberry and white chocolate. I might have visited Banfi’s vineyards to learn more about the ways it’s tackling the effects of climate change – and to take part in a mammoth hill walk – but discovering its lesser-known fizz was one of the highlights of the trip.

In case you missed it, catch up on last month’s wines to match recipes by Gordon Ramsay.

Plus, read more of Peter’s wine, beer, and spirits reviews on his blog, The Grape & The Grain