Dessert wines pair with sweets for Valentine's Day

Prevailing wisdom advises against pairing dessert wine with dessert: It's like adding honey to sugar. But that wisdom doesn't hold true for all dessert wines — and what better time than Valentine's Day to discover the best wines to pair with certain desserts?

Let's cut right to the chase and talk about chocolate. No wine is better at standing up to chocolate than Banyuls.

Produced along the "Blue Coast" of the Mediterranean in southern France, just a stone's throw from the Pyrenees Mountains, Banyuls wine comes from the normally spicy red Grenache grape. But left long to ripen under the Mediterranean sun, Grenache becomes pleasingly tangy/sweet.

Banyuls is fortified with neutral spirits to stop the fermentation before all of the grape's sweetness is gone. Subsequently, the wine is aged in barrels under a roof, where it picks up an oxidized flavor called rancio.

That makes it a perfect partner for chocolate cake, fudge, brownies, mousse or just pure chunks. It's at its best with deep, dark chocolate with medium to low sugar.

Port, too, can be a good match for chocolate. In Portugal's Douro River region, Port winemakers ferment ripe red grapes only briefly before hitting them with a dose of brandy. Port comes in a few styles, but all are essentially sweet grape juice with high alcohol. Fine red Port can be reminiscent of dark cherries, and through oak barrel aging it picks up a nut-flavored nuance. Cheese also is a good pairing, especially sharp cheeses like Stilton and cheddar.

We can thank the Portuguese for another drink that goes well with dessert: Madeira. Produced from sweet white grapes, Madeira is partly fermented and then fortified with brandy. The wine is then cooked and stirred at about 104 degrees for a few months in a storage facility known as the estufagen.

The estufa process creates the only type of wine that will last in the bottle more than a year after it has been opened. It also lends a caramel quality to Madeira, which is further enhanced with the nuttiness of oak aging.

Madeira wine comes in many types, all with an acidic backbone. Sercial, the driest, and Verdelho, the next driest, work as fine aperitif wines or with nuts. A lighter and sweeter Madeira, named Rainwater, is a fine accompaniment to chocolate-covered nuts and caramel or fruit-filled candies. But the most intriguing Madeira and dessert pairings come from Bual (known also as Boal) and Malmsey (known also as Malvasia).

Bual offers the widest range of taste and structure. It pairs with chocolate, nuts, a variety of cookies, and pies such as pumpkin, pecan, rhubarb and tart fruit pies. Malmsey is the sweetest and most lusciously textured Madeira. It's like sipping syrup. But instead of sipping it, many pour Malmsey over a helping of rich ice cream.

The Romans, too, have made their contribution to drinking with dessert. Vin Santo, which the ancient Romans first enjoyed on the Greek island of Santorini, today is produced in Tuscany from grapes that have been dried and concentrated before fermentation. After fermentation, the wine rests for years in cigar-shaped barrels under a hot roof, similar to the Banyuls treatment.

But Vin Santo is more acidic; chocolate won't do. Instead, pour a slightly chilled vinous-sweet Vin Santo into a glass and dunk a dry hazelnut or almond biscuit into the wine for a delightful treat.

The world is graced with many other dessert wines, but these are more likely to appear on the shelves of local wine shops. Bear in mind that such sweet delights don't come cheap (and realize you'll pay a premium for real Port from Portugal as opposed to port from elsewhere). Then again, making dessert even more enticing might just be worth it.