Food matching adventures with Madeira Crimea

This bottle of Massandra Madeira Crimea was consumed over two dinners recently, a Xmas Eve dinner with family and the Magnum 2000 wine dinner just before the New Year. With some 40 g/l residual sugar, it was assigned to matching desserts, but I also tried it with cheese. It failed with the Xmas pudding, not being sweet enough for it. The strange thing was that we had it with a very sweet treacle pecan pie at Xmas Eve and it threw up some interesting interactions. The sweetness of the pie was unaltered but the buttery and nutty notes came to the fore when it was eaten with a mouthful of the Madeira. Maybe it was the nuttiness of the pecans that helped here. The interesting match with cheese also accentuated the nuttiness of the cheese, this time a French Emmental.