Mooncakes call for heavenly wines

Salty mooncakes

The Moscato d'Asti sweet wines are also great accompaniments with other mooncakes with sweet fillings like dates, walnuts, mung bean, pumpkin seeds, almonds and other ingredients.

The savory qualities of salty mooncakes make them perfect partners for a medium-body red wine with moderate tannins and good acidity.

Salty mooncakes, especially those that have pastries made with lard, greatly benefit from the proper red wine. Whether your mooncake has a meat, salty egg or nut filling, a young Pinot Noir from Burgundy, New Zealand or the Pacific Northwest will bring out the best savory qualities of the mooncake while also providing some very welcome digestive assistance.

Young Burgundy Pinot Noirs from Louis Jadot, Joseph Drouhin and Domaine de Montile are all delicious and affordable wines to pair with salty meat mooncakes.

For New Zealand Pinots, try wines from Kim Crawford, Mud House and Villa Maria, while Chateau Ste Michelle offers one of Washington State's better Pinot Noir wines.

A Hong Kong-style chewy skinned mooncake with barbecue pork filling is simply delightful with an Italian Barbera red wine from Piedmont.

Good Barberas have plenty of red fruit to add flavor dimensions to the pork filling while also providing a good dose of acidity to cut through the heaviness of the pork and chewy pasty.

Likewise a mooncake with Jinhua ham in the filling pairs nicely with a Barbera or young Pinot Noir.

In addition to the beloved traditional styles of mooncakes, there are increasingly more creative new styles that incorporate new ingredients and cooking techniques.

Modern cakes

Taiwan is one of the hot spots of avant-garde mooncakes, which incorporate popular ingredients like green tea, chocolate, taro and even tiramisu. Trendy restaurants and hotels on the island sell ornately decorated gift packs of mooncakes with a variety of non-traditional ingredients.

Some mooncakes are entirely ice cream while others are all chocolate and have led traditionalists to lament that they are not mooncakes at all.

With these new and sometimes funky mooncakes, I suggest you play it safe with a traditional sweet fortified wine like Port or Sherry.

In the world of sweets, these two fortified wines are the most flexible and pair better with a wider range of sweets than any other wines in the world.

So I invite you to look up at the full and beautiful moon, savor your mooncakes and sip a truly heavenly wine.

Editor: Liu Xiongfei