Wine and chocolate, a match made in heaven

Chocolate season is upon us and some people may be wondering how to match it with wine, rather than the usual cup of tea. The wine most often spoken of in the same breath as chocolate is Banyuls, from Rousillon; its neighbour Maury rather less so. Banyuls is mainly Grenache and fermentation is stopped when there’s still lots of grape sugar left. This is done by adding grape spirit, in much the same way as port is made.

But traditional Banyuls is given quite a hard time, and deliberately so. The newly fortified wine is poured into carboys and put outside in the sun for a number of years. It’s deliberately oxidised to the extent that most Banyuls will remain stable for months, maybe years, after opening.

The Banyuls I’m suggesting this week is a rather modern version and the fruit is fresh rather than oxidised, so it’s actually more like a Maury. Think very intense strawberry fruit with some black cherry and, usefully, a touch of dark chocolate.

Port is a great partner for chocolate tart; a good, youthful, fruity port sits very comfortably with it and one of the most dependable styles is from Cockburn’s, widely available. I wouldn’t waste a good tawny on chocolate but I did once have a glass of Taylor’s 10 Year Old with a Florentine and was very pleasantly surprised. The candied peel and caramelised nuts, of course, make sense in this company.

There are enthusiasts who rave about very high cocoa solids chocolate with Pinot Noir and even some of the serious Grenaches from the Rhône but I find that the sweetness, slight as it is, seems to make the wines shrink and taste not so much dry as arid. But the slight sweetness of Amarone (the maximum permitted residual sugar is 12g per litre) really does work with Aldi’s 85 per cent chocolate which, admittedly, is quite savoury.

I have never recommended Gallo’s megabrand Apothic from California because I think it’s way too unbalanced at 16.5g/litre of residual sugar, but I’ll admit that it works surprisingly well with even milk chocolate.

Pedro Ximènez is the dark, intensely sweet wine of Jerez where everything else starts life bone dry. It’s used to sweeten Cream and other sherries but can be just too sweet and lacking in acidity to be drunk on its own. It’s seductive poured over ice cream and it works superbly with chocolate, even with Cadbury’s Buttons!