Funny what wakes you up to a wine, or puts you off. I got a care package recently from a wine-chocolate-cheese bar that interests me, in Southern California. The place is very ambitious: It’s called Eno, and it’s at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel.
The idea is to create an environment focused exclusively on these three pleasures, with experts on hand to guide guests toward great experiences. The photographs look beautiful, and yet when the package arrived, I found something puzzling: a bottle of 2003 B. R. Cohn Cabernet Sauvignon, and a box of four chocolates. I want to be ginger about this, because I was grateful for the samples—who doesn’t like getting wine and chocolate in the mail?—but Cabernet Sauvignon is a textbook example of a wine that pairs terribly with chocolate.
Chocolate can make Cabernet horribly tannic. Curious about this, because the chocolates alone were wonderful, I phoned the sommelier at the hotel to ask about the pairing. She said Eno had no particular pairing in mind with the samples; they just wanted to provide two products people usually like.
I guess I was so startled by this because I had a guided tasting of wine and chocolate once, with Michael Recchiuti and one of the partners in the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant in San Francisco. I’ll describe this in detail in an upcoming post, but it was an absolute tour de force of pairings, incredibly instructive and surprising. And yet, even there, Cabernet Sauvignon was offered merely to demonstrate, again and again, just what a disaster the wine-plus-chocolate mix can be.
Anyway, I just scratched my head and enjoyed the chocolates, and didn’t open the Cabernet again until last night, after a long and wonderful meal that began with an Argyle sparkling wine and moved on to a great Super Tuscan with grass-fed steaks, cannellini beans, and garlicky kale. When the cheeses came out at the end, that plummy B. R. Cohn was a smooth, fruity pair to my Humboldt Fog goat cheese.
Thank you! For years I’ve been getting looks of “Aren’t we hoity toity” from friends when I insist plenty of red wines don’t go well with chocolate! Which ones do? I was so put off by a few CA zin and cabernets that I stopped trying.
There’s an Eno here in Chicago too – must be the same chain, with the same theme of Chocolate Wine and Cheese – in one of our hotels. And it’s a fine place to get a glass of wine, but they really don’t seem to do anything about *pairing* their wines with either cheese or chocolate. It’s a lovely space, and the servers all seemed quite nice, but it was a hollow experience.
In my (limited) experience – the only wine that could ever be paired with a Chocolate is a Brachetto d’Acqui (red sparkler from Piedmont) – really nice with somthing high in cocoa content, maybe a little raspberry – yummy yummy :)
The most wonderful and simply scrumptious pairing of wine and chocolate is that of your favorite chardonnay together with your favorite chocolate…..
The only time I’ve thought wine and chocolate went together was when I tried some freshly roasted whole cacao beans with wine. If you can stand tannic and bitter, the beans were so tannic that the wine softened them and the wine brought the fruity notes out of the beans. I think the fat in normal chocolate coats the tongue and blocks most of the flavor in wine, leaving just some receptors at the back of the throat for tannin. The cacao beans don’t have such a rich smooth texture and don’t coat the tongue; even so this wasn’t a match made in heaven as much as an interesting combo.
Vino100 does the same thing here in Oregon: they have some truly luscious cheese/wine/chocolate pairings, and some that leave me scratching my head.
One of their most interesting offerings is Vinyard Varietals’ Cabernet Sauvignon filled dark chocolate truffles. They’re … definitely unique.
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree. I think Chocolate and Cabernet Sauvignon are two of the best things in the world so I can’t imagine having them taste poorly, even together.
Of course, if the wine is very watered down or to the contrary, very tannic, it gets more challenging but a good Cabernet stands up to the darkest/bitterest of chocolates. My family and I were in Napa Valley a couple of months ago and visited my favorite winery; Honig (it’s a small family winery with a great vibe and outstanding wines, they are one of the few napa wineries that offer great value and don’t rip you off which is hard to come by these days). We took some dark chocolate with us and tasted it with their Cabernet and loved it…it was decadent! I can see how all those flavors can be a mouthful for some and for those I recommend a desert wine since I tasted it with their late harvest Sauvgnon Blanc and the acid just broke right through that bitterness.
From what I’ve tried and read the only combo that seemed to work is a young jammy Pinot Noir that is low on tannins with bitter or bitter/sweet chocolate with less than 10 grams sugar/serving. Anything sweeter seems to cancel out any residual sugar in the wine and leave you with nothing but the acid and tannins from the wine. Famous rule of thumb, never eat food that is sweeter than the wine.
From what I’ve tried and read the only combo that seemed to work is a young jammy Pinot Noir that is low on tannins with bitter or bitter/sweet chocolate with less than 10 grams sugar/serving. Anything sweeter seems to cancel out any residual sugar in the wine and leave you with nothing but the acid and tannins from the wine. Famous rule of thumb, never eat food that is sweeter than the wine.