Try this. The next time you've got a pork tenderloin hanging around the house with nothing to do,
slice it through the middle lengthwise, layer one half with prunes and apricots that have soaked in Bourbon for an hour or two,
close it up, tie the halves together with kitchen twine, season it with salt and pepper, and roast it in a 400 degree oven
until a meat thermometer stuck into the fleshiest part reads 145 degrees (about an hour).
You can make a simple sauce by taking the leftover Bourbon from your fruit marinade and reducing it in a pan with some butter and brown sugar to taste.
Rest the meat for ten minutes, then slice it at the table and pass the sauce.
In a word, yum.
Now you've got to select a beverage of some kind.
With sweetness flooding over your palate from the fruit and the whiskey, as well as the caramelized fat of the pork itself,
you must follow the age-old dictum: make sure that what you're drinking is as sweet or sweeter than what you're eating.
Why? Because once your mouth is inundated with sugar, it shuts the subtler parts of your sensory apparatus down.
Complex wines with dry, earthy flavors cannot be processed on the palate. Furthermore, they taste bitter and austere in tandem with the sweet food.
The threshold for balance has been altered in your mouth-there's no going back.
This applies whether you're having the pork above, duck a l'orange, glazed ham, sweet tomato sauce, candied yams, roasted squash, Texas brisket, honey baked chicken, grilled salmon or ketchupy burgers-it's all sweet.

Faced with this truth, some folks opt for beer.
Not a bad idea at all. Sweet, malty Belgian beers work wonders with sweet foods, as do Scottish ales and fruit-based lambics.
At Nancy's we also love to give people late-ripened white wines for this stuff, like Rieslings Gewurztraminers, Scheurebes, Muscats and Chenin Blancs. But if it's red wines you seek, have no fear: your choices are many, various and wonderful.

1) Choose "New World" over "Old World"
We rarely give this advice, but here it really applies. Wines made in the warm, sunny climes of California and Australia tend to possess the wads of ripe, forward fruit that your sweet menu requires.

2) Choose Youth over Age
Older, mature wines are often too subtle for barbecue. Their primary sweetness has given way to secondary flavors and spices, and their flavors are too subtle overall. Stick with one-to-two-year-old bottles.

3) Choose Fruit Sweetness over Oak Sweetness
There is an artificial kind of sweetness that derives from oak. That's not what you want-its artificiality becomes screamingly obvious the moment it encounters glazed, fruity or saucy fare. Look for wines with less aging in barrel. Likely candidates include Beaujolais, Barberas, and certain Zinfandels, Syrahs, and Pinot Noirs-any one of Nancy's crack staff can steer you toward the perfect choice (it's what we love to do)

4) Our top five for this month
Here are five red wines we frequently rely on to help people accompany their sweetly flavored dishes.

At the bargain level, you can save money and achieve joy with:
Campos Reales 'Canforrales Joven' 2002 from Spain ($5.99)
McGuigan Brothers 'Black Label' (unoaked) Shiraz 2002 from Australia ($8.99).
Both of these wines exhibit all of the necessary characteristics we described above while still being effective for budget control.

Moving up one level on the pricing scale, many of our customers are addicted to the
Mionetto Novello 2003 from the Veneto ($10.99)
which we call the "chick wine" because of its winsome photograph of a chick hatching from its egg on the label. Pure plums and cherries-it's like a nuclear Beaujolais Nouveau from Italy.

Those who would like a step up in elegance might try the Buchli Station Pinot Noir 2002 from Napa ($14.99) which was our #1 Thanksgiving pick in 2003. Remember all those yams and cranberries? It was perfection, and remains so.

And finally, the grandaddy of them all, the Coturri 'Chauvet Vineyard' Zinfandel 2001 from Sonoma ($23.99) may be the most hedonistic, gorgeously funky, sweetly styled dinner wine ever conceived by man. Coturri + baby backs = paradise.