Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ ends its month-long celebration of some of American cuisine’s greatest dishes from classic comfort foods to the unsung greats of American soulfood, with a decidedly European-take on a well-recognised transatlantic treat.

One word describes the 2003 Château de Fesles Bonnezeaux (12.5%) from the Loire Valley and available from Oddbins in the UK and Wine Chateau.com in the US (with numerous vintages available in Canada, New Zealand, and mainland Europe): smooth.

Made from 100% botrytis Chenin Blanc grapes, the Bonnezeaux screams smooth operator…not unlike the way Sade used to do on the radio. It has a fine golden colour with a rich, slightly creamy fresh fruit flavour with a hint of vanilla or nutmeg thrown in for good measure and makes for a stunningly attractive match to the smooth and silky mix of cream and fruit found in InterWined’s Own Pomegranate & Blueberry Cheesecake.

Like the hamburger and countless other “American” foods, the American cheesecake is rooted across the Atlantic in the kitchens and dinning rooms of a host of different European traditions. So what makes a cheesecake American? New Yorkers and Chicagoans might tell you it’s the baking.

But it’s not.

It’s the cream cheese. Cream cheese is a wholly American invention. Not until William Lawrence invented his now famous Philadelphia cream cheese in 1872 on his farm in New York State and its eventual owners, Kraft Foods, managed to manufacture a pasteurised version in 1912, did any cheesecakes resemble the stuff of today, whether or it was cooked as the New Yorkers and Chicagoans would recommend, or uncooked as the British and many others prefer. Before then, all cheesecakes were made the European way with a filling made of ricotta, mascarpone, quark, or Neufchatel cheeses.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the American preference for baking doesn’t continue. Indeed, outside of perhaps only a handful of US restaurants and cities, the cooked cheesecake remains the more time-consuming norm. And while InterWined hates to pick sides in this most delicious debate (both are great!), for the sake of time and convenience, why not throw American preferences to one side and enjoy the speed and ease of a simple, smooth uncooked cheesecake, such as InterWined’s Own Pomegranate & Blueberry Cheesecake.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Pomegranate & Blueberry Cheesecake

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week ‘Blow the Bank’ returns to Beatrice Peltre, La Tartine Gourmande, and her Versatility in a Spinach and Sweet Potato Cake to bring you Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffins.

For many eaters, muffins are synonymous with one meal — breakfast. But, long before the humble blueberry muffin appeared in a powder from Betty Crocker or its low fat oat cranberry cousin went on sale at Starbucks, the muffin was a tea cake and before that a bread.

So while Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin makes an excellent breakfast muffin — and it does to be sure — it also makes a superb dessert cake and, even, a superior alternative to the more common apple sauce and potato found served alongside a nice pork loin or chop. (Don’t believe me, try it and you’ll see.)

On this occasion, InterWined chose to serve it as a dessert or pudding, as some people might prefer.

The 2006 Peter Lehmann Botrytis Semillon (12.5%), £7.99 from Oddbins for a half bottle and widely available in the US for approximately $18-$20, made for an almost perfect match. Why almost perfect? The wine is just a tad too sugary sweet. Peter Lehmann’s chief winemaker confidently proclaims the 2006 vintage its finest ever produced, and InterWined is hard pressed to disagree. This wine is fresh and, mostly, easy-to-drink. The colour is a honeyed gold, with the slight sense of honey continuing on the nose before really hitting the palate with a burst of honeyed fruit. This is wine made from bees, if ever there was one.

But, for InterWined, it all comes back to the sensation that there is just a tad too much sweetness in the wine. Normally, if one finds a dessert wine too sweet it would indicate an imbalance. Yet, in all honesty, I don’t think that there is one. The slightness of it all could equally suggest that my complaint is simply one of personal preference. (Maybe I just don’t like wine made of noble rot, as much as I thought I did.)

In terms of the pairing, what might have made this a more prefect match and probably helped to overcome any nagging sense of sweetness would have been to increase the amount of sweet potato and cheese by a few millimetres and sprinkle into the mixture a few more twists of pepper mill. But be careful when doing so, too much grated potato or cheese and the muffin will loose its very appealing lightness and become quite stodgy.

In the end, Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin with Peter Lehmann’s Botrytis Semillon: 8.something rather impressive but equally probably rather meaningless, something Robert Parker Scale-esque like 86/100. Whatever that means.

Mostly InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin
(Makes six muffins)

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