Dessert wine substitutes

Light, aromatic, sweet white wines with grapey or peachy fruit, widely stocked and inexpensive.

Best for

poached fruit, sabayon, macerating berries, syrups and glazes

The right default when a recipe says dessert wine without naming one, because that instruction almost always means a sweet white. Moscato is the cheapest and most available, tasting of grape, orange blossom and peach, and it reduces to a clean floral syrup that suits poached pears, macerated berries, a fruit sabayon or a panna cotta. Late-harvest riesling is sharper and more citrus and lime, which gives a livelier result. The one thing Moscato lacks is acidity, so if you are replacing a high-acid wine like Sauternes the sauce can taste a bit flabby; a teaspoon of lemon juice per quarter cup fixes it.

Botrytised sweet whites, concentrated by noble rot, tasting of apricot, honey and marmalade with high acidity.

Best for

sabayon, poached fruit, with blue cheese and foie gras, fruit tarts

The premium end of the sweet white family, and interchangeable with each other. What sets them apart from Moscato is acidity: they are genuinely sweet and genuinely sharp at the same time, which is why they work with foie gras and blue cheese rather than tasting cloying. In a poached fruit syrup or a sabayon that acidity keeps the dish from being heavy. Monbazillac and Tokaji are the value picks; Tokaji Aszu is the same botrytis character from Hungary at a lower price. Sauternes is often spelled Sauterne without the final s on older American labels, where it historically meant any sweet white.

Fortified sweet wines aged in contact with air, tasting of raisin, walnut, toffee and dried fig.

Best for

chocolate and coffee desserts, tiramisu, with hard cheese and nuts, dried fruit and cake soaking

These are dessert wines too, but they sit in a completely different flavor register, and swapping across the two groups changes the dish noticeably. Where a Moscato reduction tastes of apricot and flowers, a Madeira or tawny port reduction tastes of dried fig, walnut and caramel: darker, richer and more savory. That is delicious with chocolate, coffee, tiramisu, hard cheese, nuts and roasted fruit, and slightly odd with delicate white peaches or a light lemon cream. Their huge practical advantage is keeping: an opened bottle lasts a month or more in the fridge because it is already oxidised, where a light sweet white is finished in three or four days.

A fortified sweet wine infused with wormwood, gentian and other botanicals.

Best for

chocolate desserts, orange and cherry dishes, poached figs, savory glazes

A reasonable stand-in if it is what you have, and genuinely good in a few places. The sweetness level is roughly right and it has the alcohol and body of a fortified wine. The difference is the bitterness: wormwood and gentian give it a distinctly bitter-herbal, faintly medicinal backbone that is a real asset with chocolate, orange, cherries and coffee, and a poor fit with delicate poached fruit or a plain custard, where it tastes oddly savory. Use a little less than the recipe calls for and taste, because that bitterness intensifies as the liquid reduces.

The alcohol-free build, using lemon for the acid a good dessert wine brings and honey for the floral note.

Best for

alcohol-free desserts, poached fruit, cooking for children, syrups

Pleasant, and honest about what it is. Grape juice already carries roughly the sugar level of a sweet wine, so you are mainly adding back the acidity and the aromatics. The lemon is essential; without it the syrup tastes flat and one-note. Two real differences. Alcohol dissolves and carries aroma, so a juice syrup smells and tastes less complex, more like sweetened fruit. And alcohol lowers the freezing point, so a sorbet or granita made this way sets into a much harder block and needs scraping with a fork every half hour. Reduce it gently, since it caramelizes sooner than wine.

The honest case for cheese courses, foie gras and any recipe where the wine is the whole flavor.

Best for

knowing when not to substitute, cheese courses, sabayon, wine pairings

In a sabayon made from two ingredients, or served in a glass beside a blue cheese or a walnut tart, the wine is not seasoning anything, it is the dish. There is no non-alcoholic version of that experience, and juice with honey in it tastes like juice with honey in it. The least bad plan when you cannot get the specific bottle is to stay within the same family: a botrytised wine for a botrytised wine, a nutty fortified wine for a nutty fortified wine. Crossing between the two families always changes the dessert, sometimes for the better, but never invisibly.