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Summer Sips – Grilled Peaches Three Ways, Plus Wine Pairings!
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Generally speaking, grilling is associated far more with the production of savory eats than it is with creating sticky sweet desserts. Baking may be a more traditional method for whipping up post-dinner delights, but when it’s hot and muggy outside ain’t no way we’re firing up that fire-bellied beast and turning our kitchen into the pseudo-surface of the sun. Instead, we use the summer heat as an excuse to get creative with farmer’s market produce and our arsenal of dessert-ish ingredients, creating good eats with a mere fraction of the cookie-and-cake sweat factor.

To recap: easy, yummy, and oven-free cuisine. Can we assume you’re all on board now?

There are a lot of ways to go when it comes to grilling up dessert...

... (if you've never grilled pound cake and topped it with balsamic-macerated strawberries, your life is quite sincerely lacking something truly special

…, but we find ourselves coming back to peaches again and again. We’re not alone, it seems, because there are an awful lot of grilled peach recipes out there, and they’re all darned delicious. The only thing that could possibly make them more scrumdiddlyumptious? Wine, of course!o

Grilled Peaches and Vanilla Ice Cream with Tokaji

This five-ingredient special comes courtesy of online recipe warehouse MyRecipes.com, along with the equally simple introductory text “This super-simple grilled peaches recipe has only five ingredients, making it perfect for last-minute summer entertaining.” We have to agree.

Check out MyRecipes for more details and directions.

To bring this dessert to life we paired it with Tokaji, a Hungarian dessert wine characterized by the distinctive complex flavors it gets from being exposed to botrytis, or the “noble rot.” While the wine is undeniably honeyed and sweet, there is a swirl of lime, star fruit, grapefruit, and a sort of nuttiness that is vaguely reminiscent of lychee. Add to that a perky finish thanks to a healthy dose of acidity and this beauty will work with your grilled peaches and cream or with coconut cookies.

Buy the Wine: Royal Tokaji 5 Puttonyos, $42.99

The Pioneer Woman’s Grilled Peaches and Pecans and Tawny Port

A friend passed along this recipe by Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, a few years back and it’s been in our summer dessert rotation ever since. While similar to the above recipe, Drummond’s version adds maple syrup and pecans. Both ingredients add more complexity to an otherwise simply recipe, and they also change our wine recommendation.

Visit The Pioneer Woman for her awesome grilled peach recipe and other delicious dishes.

We had debated on a Sauterne here, mostly because we love Sauterne and pecans together, but the maple syrup got us thinking about tawny Port and boy was it a winner. Tawny Port has nutty, cream, maple-esque undertones as it is, and the additional notes of dried fruits like fig and apricot and a mild spiciness from ginger only improve matters.

Buy the Wine: Taylor Fladgate 20 Year Old Tawny, $42.99

Grilled Peaches and Raspberry Sauce with Rose

We finish off our grilled peach retrospective with a doozy from Bon Appetit. The usual suspects – peaches, brown sugar, butter – are offset by fresh raspberries and a healthy spritz of lemon juice, requiring us to sip on something a bit lighter than our selections above.

Head over to Bon Appetit and revel in the details of this ever-so-worthy recipe.

Classic French rose has all the peachy, raspberry goodness this light and bright dessert needs, plus plenty of acidity, salinity, and minerality to keep the dish from feeling one-note or overly sweet.

Bonus: if you’re expecting A-list company, you can tell them the wine we picked below is made by Brangelina themselves. Pretty cool, eh?

Buy the Wine: Miraval Rose 2014, $20.99

What is your favorite grilled dessert recipe? And, perhaps more importantly, what wine do you pair it with?

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About The Author
Alana Luna
Alana Luna
Alana is a freelance food and wine writer currently living in Las Vegas, NV. She is a lifelong hospitality enthusiast, having been born into the industry and raised in restaurants (and perhaps the odd bar or two…). Prior to writing full time, Alana worked on the Las Vegas Strip where she was lucky to learn from some of the leading wine professionals in the world while tasting some of the very best bottles wine country (in the broadest sense of the term) has to offer. Above all, she believes in the power of a really good story, and stories involving food and wine are her very favorite tales to tell.

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