Concerning the Pairing of Chocolate and Wine
Chocolate and red wine appear on the same board at a great many gatherings, and they fight almost every time.
The reason is sugar. A wine tastes dry relative to whatever preceded it, so a dry red following a sweet dessert arrives thin, sharp, and metallic. Meanwhile the tannin in the wine collides with the tannin in the cacao, and the whole encounter turns to chalk.
The pairings that succeed do so by respecting the arithmetic. A dark bar at seventy percent or above, with genuinely low sugar, against a rich, fruit forward red with soft tannin. Or a fortified wine, a tawny port or a Banyuls, which brings enough sweetness of its own to stop the wine tasting stripped.
The better answer, generally, is to stop insisting on wine. Chocolate is superb with coffee, with a well aged rum, with a peated whisky if you are feeling adventurous, and with nothing at all, which is how it was designed to be eaten and how it shows itself most clearly.
Yours, with a raised brow and a raised glass,
