Red Wine & Chocolate: The Conflict of Concept and Reality

(Seattlepi) - Recently, just after our annual pre-Valentine’s orgy of wine and chocolate events/pairing suggestions/tastings, my esteemed colleague, Paul Gregutt, posted a very carefully-worded caution on Facebook. Paul, it should be said, is one of the most polite writers I’ve ever encountered, so his post on the real truth about red wine and chocolate – that it’s really a fairly lousy and almost defiantly problematic combination – was so tentative and genteel that even the most staunch, intractable advocate of the red-chocolate school would have had to work to take offense.

Unburdened as I am with Paul’s brand of Northwest uber-gentility, I’ve said basically the same thing to people who have come to me in the past, asking for suggestions for what red to serve with which chocolate. My standard response has been the same for about twenty years. The two-headed monster of wine-food pairing, for me, has always been: “What Chocolate with Wine” (or vice-versa) and/or “What Wine Goes With Cajun Food”. Every time I hear either one, I feel like Carl the groundskeeper in “Caddy Shack”: I try everything and nothing kills the monster.

But here it is again, in a nutshell:

What wine goes with Cajun food?  BEER. ICED TEA. SODA POP…NOT wine.

What Chocolate goes best with dry Red Wine?  NONE OF ‘EM.

The exact problem with dry red wine and chocolate is fairly simple: sugar. An excess of sugar makes a dry red taste sour. It’s a matter of contrast. In the same way that the Spanish discovered aeons ago that salty foods make red wine sweeter, sugar content in sweet foods overwhelms the sweetness of a dry red and makes it taste sour by comparison. The easiest proof of this is to make a cup of hot chocolate along with your coffee, in the morning, and taste the chocolate before you taste the coffee with cream and sugar. The cocoa coats the tongue and makes the sweetened coffee taste metallic and sour. This is a daily occurrence, at my house, where I have to make my squeeze’s coffee first, before I mix up my cocoa. If I slip and taste the chocolate, I’ll have no idea what her coffee tastes like.