Blue cheese and dessert wines have long been considered as a classic food and wine pairing.  The saltiness of blue cheese and the sweetness of dessert wines creates a big and interesting contrast.\

Blue cheese can be produced by cow milk, sheep milk or goat milk which has mold of blue Buy Diflucan Online Pharmacy No Prescription Needed or blue-green colour.  It has very strong flavour.  Famous blue cheese examples include Stilton from Britain and Roquefort from France.  I have bought two kinds of blue cheese this time from CitySuper supermarket.  The first one is a generic Danish blue cheese at HK$25 100 grams.  The second one is Stilton selling at HK$35 100 grams.  If you want to buy to try, I strongly advise you to avoid the Danish blue cheese since it has a very strange flavour similar to plastic.  Stilton, in contrast, is very smooth and creamy.  When we have finished eating all the Stilton, there are still half of the Danish blue cheese no one want to eat more!

For dessert wines, we have choose three bottles: 2006 Marks and Spencer Hermit Hills Botrytis Semillon, 2002 Hugel Vendange Tardive Gewürztraminer and 1997 Ch. Filhot Sauternes.

For 2006 Marks and Spencer Hermit Hills Botrytis Semillon, I really didn’t have much expectation.  For a dessert wine selling at HK$78 for half bottle, I believe it will not have sufficient acidity to balance sweetness of the wine.  While I found this wine has acceptable level of acidity, it still cannot fully balance its sweetness.  It has flavours of dried apricot, lychee, honey and beeswax.  For this price, I think it is not bad.

2002 Hugel Vendange Tardive Gewürztraminer is produced from Alsace.  Hugel is one of the most famous producer in Alsace.  Vendange Tardive (short-form VT) means late harvest.  Since the grape has more time to ripen, the grapes will be more ripe and sweeter.  Resulting wines, undoubtly, will always have some residual sugar.

Since Gewürztraminer has low acidity and the wine usually will have high alcohol level even if they are not late harvest, Gewürztraminer VT usually will already taste quite sweet comparing to Riesling VT.  If you want to have a sweet Riesling, you will have to pay more to buy Selection de Grains Nobles (short-form SGN).  SGN is produced from grapes manually picked and affected by noble rot.  Noble rot will shrivel the grapes and increase its concentration.

Gewürztraminer is known for its strong lychee flavour.  Wine produced is usually full-bodied.  This Gewürztraminer VT has very strong flavour of dried lychee with hints of honey, orange peel, floral and minerality.

Most of my friend found this bottle is the best among the three.  I believe this is mainly because of its strong perfume.  However, this is not my favoite wine style.  For dessert wine, the style I love most is one that is refreshing, ligher in body but still very perfume.  For this reason, I prefer Riesling SGN more.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have it this time.

The last bottle is 1997 Ch. Filhot produced in Bordeaux Buy kamagra jelly online Sauternes.  Filhot 1997 used a lot of Sauvignon Blanc (36%) to supplement Semillon.  For this reason, the wine has very good acidity and is much more refreshing than the previous two.  I quite like this style.  However, I found this wine is lacking a bit of complexity and concentration.  A slightly disappointing bottle of Sauternes.

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