The Case for Eating Backwards

Lunch at The Modern Pantry in Clerkenwell ended with our host, José Rallo, singing Brazilian songs at the table. José runs the Sicilian estate Donnafugata with her brother Antonio, and she is also a singer, so the performance was probably less of a surprise to her than it was to us.

By then we had reached the sweet wine, a glass of Ben Ryé Passito di Pantelleria, and a greedy thought had occurred to me: why can’t we always start dinner with dessert and work backwards?

The pairing made a good case for it. Ben Ryé came with a popcorn panna cotta, brown bread ice cream and a miso and orange caramel, a dessert with enough salt and toastiness to stand up to the sweetness of the wine. I also loved the wild fennel tucked into the flower arrangement. It grows along the roadsides in Sicily, and having recently been in Marsala, I was happy to find it on a table in London.

Pantelleria is a small volcanic island that sits closer to Tunisia than to Sicily, reached by a short flight on a small plane. It is a windy place, and the wind earns its keep: together with the sun, it dries the grapes and concentrates their sugars, the technique Italians call passito. The name Ben Ryé comes from the Arabic for “son of the wind”, which seems only fair.

There are many fine sweet wines made this way, but Passito di Pantelleria has a character of its own, with exotic Mediterranean notes and a breezy freshness that keeps the sweetness lively. It makes an uplifting end to a meal, and a good deal more upbeat than a vino da meditazione, the kind of wine you sit with in contemplative silence.

Which brings me back to José and her Brazilian songs. Some wines are hard to put into words, and that afternoon a song described this one better than any tasting note could.