Life just got sweeter, red wine and chocolate pairings!
Who loves chocolate?! WE DO! Who loves red wine?! WE DO! As we already know chocolate and red wine are both delicious but are they delicious when put together? This is a long-standing and contentious debate that leaves many people fairly wary when pairing the two together!
You may think it is just simple to grab a bottle and grab a bar from the shelf, but this can lead to disastrous results for your taste buds! It actually takes a little bit of research and experimentation you get those heavenly matches! Luckily for us all, there are a number of rules or guidelines that we can follow in order to find our perfect chocolate and wine paring!
First things first, if your chocolate is sweet then you should try to find a wine that has a similar sweetness. If it differs a bit that is absolutely fine, just make sure they aren’t polar opposites!
The reason for this is that if you get chocolate that is much sweeter than the wine then the bitter flavour from the wine will come out and leave a nasty taste in your mouth. However, if your wine is too sweet then you will not be able to taste your chocolate!
Our next guideline is to try and match the flavour intensities! So, a rich deep dark chocolate will go very well with rich wine. Similarly, if you have lighter chocolate then your wine will need to be a lighter one too.
These are just some basic rules to follow when pairing wine and chocolate! Now, we can go into the nitty-gritty and look into some actual pairings.
If the more bitter and darker chocolate takes your fancy you’ll want a strong red! Some wines that have this feature are Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz or Ruby Port. For the more bitter chocolate, due to their strong flavour and limited sugar, it can match well with these deeper red wines.
For the sweeter chocolate of the world, a wine with more robust flavours is needed. Wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon or a red Zinfandel is perfect for chocolate such as this. Furthermore, you can pair these with some Merlot or Pinot Noir.
Although some people do not class white chocolate as chocolate, we will for this post. White chocolate pairs really well with a Zinfandel as well. This pairing is a bit of an anomaly as they are quite literally opposites…but it just works! After all, they do say, opposites attract!
Here at Choc on Choc, we hope that this post will help you in your future quest into the chocolate and wine pairings! Don’t forget to try out your own pairings! Let us know about them in the comments below!
