Sommelier to Go: Wine and Chocolate
Chocolate is delicious, whether it's in the form of a bar or a chocolate layer cake with mocha buttercream. You've got intense flavors, bitter flavors, and sugar added to varying degrees. When matching wine to this dessert favorite, these three factors will inform your choice. Just in time for Valentine's Day, Serious Eats's Sommelier to Go, Joshua Wesson, gives you two great recommendations and some general guidelines.
OUR SOMMELIER SAYS
With the semisweet and extra-dark bars here, you have two variations on the chocolate theme, the more intense flavors existing in the extra-dark bar. You must have wines that are therefore varyingly intense.
It's always best to find a wine as sweet or a little sweeter than the chocolate you're eating with it, otherwise you risk making the chocolate taste flat or even sour.
With Chocolate cake, it's always better to opt for a lighter, sweet red wine—the tawny port as seen in this video would be good or even a ruby port, which isn't aged in the barrel but in the bottle.
FEATURED WINES
Fabre Montmayou Malbec
This Argentine dry is dark and intense, Wesson says, and is a good match for an extra-dark more bitter tasting chocolate. "You can't even read the label through it," Wesson says. "It's inky and absolutely opaque but has a lot of bitter flavors that go beautifully with the chocolate. Here, it really is a color match. You don't even need sweetness in the wine, because the chocolate is barely sweet, and the wine's fruitiness will cover the sweetiness in the chocolate."
De Bortoli Willowglen Tawny Port
If you were to throw a semisweet chocolate into the mix, Wesson says, it would make the Malbec taste flat. But this tawny port has enough sweetness to handle the semisweet bar and enough tannin to cover the chocolate's bitter notes.
CHOCOLATE SEEN IN THIS VIDEO
Scharffen Berger 82% cacao extra-dark chocolate, 3-ounce bar, $4.50 from scharffenberger.com
Scharffen Berger 62% cacao semisweet nibby, 3-ounce bar, $4.50 from scharffenberger.com
For more on some seriously good chocolate, see our Valentine's Day Chocolate Guide
More 'Sommelier to Go' Videos
Wine with Cheese
Wine with Burgers
Wine with Pizza
ABOUT JOSHUA WESSON
We like Joshua because he took wine and made it accessible to everyone. You can walk in to one of his Best Cellars stores with $20 and leave with a great bottle of wine and $5 in change—each bottle he and his colleagues scour the world to carefully select is $15 or less.
View other entries from Serious Eats Original Videos.
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1 Comment:
Glad he mentioned Banyuls, because if he didn't, I was gonna!
Chocolate can be a good application for some of those over the top Aussie Shiraz too.
Simple Ruby or Tawny ports seem better suited for sweet chocolate desserts. Save the complex vintage stuff for contemplating by themselves.
Bob Ferrapuhls at 7:27PM on 02/12/07