Tarta de Santiago with Valdespino Moscatel Promesa

Tarta de Santiago is a cake without butter and without much flour: most of it is almond meal, and the flavour comes from lemon zest, cinnamon and the roasted almond itself. That is a dry, almost grainy sweetness, and it calls for a wine that brings moisture and floweriness instead of even more toasted notes. A moscatel does exactly that: at 237 grams of residual sugar per litre it is clearly sweet, but that sweetness comes with blossom, honey and citrus, and that citrus runs in step with the lemon zest in the cake. Because the wine has aged oxidatively for only four years, it is less thickened than a Pedro Ximenez and stays fresh enough not to flatten a cake. The sweetness on both sides does not fight here, because in a mixture sweetness mainly suppresses the other flavours and hardly itself. The Consejo Regulador mentions desserts, fruit and cream ice cream for moscatel, and Valdespino itself desserts with nuts.

Serve this moscatel lightly chilled, between 12 and 14 degrees, the temperature the Consejo Regulador gives for this style. A white wine glass or a catavinos of about 200 millilitres is the right size, with just a little in it; it is a dessert in a glass and not a table wine. After opening, a moscatel keeps for about two months, with the bottle closed and stored cool.