Girl Scout Cookie Wine Tasting

We held our third annual Girl Scout cookie wine tasting last week, and we had a ball. A Girl Scout cookie wine tasting is the perfect event for people who need an excuse to loosen up around wine. It’s hard to be serious when you’re eating Girl Scout cookies ☺

This year, we took a more scientific approach to our voting. We tasted and talked about each wine, and then tried each cookie with that wine, before moving on to the next wine.

Before sharing the results, let me tell you about the wines, the cookies and the scoring.

We tasted six wines, all made by WineShop At Home and all made from California grapes:

• Petit Cadeau Semi-Seco Sparkling – this sparkling wine offers a nice balance of sweetness and acidity, with aromas of green apple, pear, flowers, orange and anise
• Lumiére De Vie 2010 Sauvignon Blanc – a tart yet sweet white wine with aromas of green apple, pear and anise, with hints of lemon peel and hazelnut
• Milano Cellars 20011 Dolcetto – a berry party in your mouth, this chilled red wine is quite a treat
• Lumiére De Vie 2010 Merlot – a very smooth wine that has fresh ripe blackberry, raspberry and lightly toasted oak aromas, with hints of cherry and cinnamon
• Halcyon 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon – this wine offers generous aromas of ripe fruit with distinctly cabernet aromas of plum and cassis along with a nice jammy undertone of blackberry with hints of oak and leather
• Ceres Moonlight Port – a fortified wine with dense aromas of plum, allspice and bing cherry, with hints of earth and dark chocolate

We tasted eight Girl Scout cookies:

• Trefoil – traditional shortbread
• Thin Mint – mint-flavored covered with chocolate
• Savannah Smile – lemon-flavored dusted with powdered sugar
• Do-Si-Do – peanut butter sandwich cookie
• Thank U Berry Munch – cranberries with white fudge chips
• Samoa – toasted coconut, caramel and chocolate
• Tagalong – layer of peanut butter covered in chocolate
• Dulce de Leche – cookie with milk caramel chips

We used the following very scientific scores:

• Y = Yuck
• O = Okay
• G = Good
• W = WINEderful

Results

Starting with the Wine

The wine that the most people loved with the most number of cookies was the sparkling wine. I think that the particular sparkling wine in our lineup, a semi-seco that has some sweetness, is a very easy match. Sparkling wine tends to cleanse the palate with each and every taste, and the sweetness enables it to work with the sweetness in the cookies.

Starting with the Cookie

The cookie that the most people loved with the most number of wines was the Dulce de Lece. I think this cookie is the most exciting “neutral” Girl Scout cookie in the lineup, which made it good for pairing. While some people loved the lemon cookie (Savannah Smile), for example, with several of the wines, they disliked it tremendously with several other wines. This cookie’s lack of neutrality made it a challenging cookie to work well with a broad array of wines.

This Year vs. Last Year

This year’s results were more mixed than last year’s. Last year, we had a Chardonnay in our lineup that paired beautifully with the two peanut butter cookies (Do-Si-Do and Tagalong) and the Samoa. This year’s Sauvignon Blanc wasn’t as good a match with those cookies.

Wrapping Up

The takeaway here is that it is a lot of fun to spend time with friends pairing wines with a particular food group.

If you’ve done any special wine pairings, including cookie pairings, I would love to hear about your experiences.