What to Pair with Chocolate? - Food & Wine

If you are pressed for time

The bitterness of chocolate is the main challenge when pairing wine with chocolate.

• For dark or milk chocolate: Banyuls or Maury.
• White chocolate pairs best with white wines: Gewürztraminer, Muscat de Rivesaltes from Château Lauriga.

So how do you pair wine with chocolate?

Chocolate, like wine, offers a wide variety of flavors. So what should you do, and what kind of wine should you choose? Chocolate has a rich mouthfeel, much like wine, and it fills your mouth with a variety of flavors that linger for a while. There’s also a slightly bitter note, especially in chocolates with a high cocoa content, which can make choosing and tasting a bit challenging. Port is often considered a classic pairing for chocolate, but there are other alternatives from French vineyards, with wines that are relatively similar to Port.
The goal is to balance out this bitterness, so we’d opt for a sweet red wine to complement the flavor and provide a slightly sweet note that contrasts nicely with the bitterness. Sometimes chocolate with a very high cocoa content can pair well with full-bodied red wines, but this is rather rare because bitter flavors don’t pair well. White chocolate, on the other hand, deserves special treatment since it’s rarely found in bar form. It’s often used in pastries and desserts, so to pair with it, one might choose a late-harvest wine instead, with its sweet and mellow character.

A very smooth wine

So, the key is to pair chocolate with something sweet, a touch of sugar, and some color. For wines similar to Port, you can choose sweet red wines from Roussillon, such as Banyuls or Maury. For white chocolate, there are some lovely late-harvest white wines from Alsace, such as Gewurztraminer. Also consider the Muscat de Rivesaltes from Château Lauriga, which can be a great pairing for your desserts!

Chocolate and wine?

That’s right—wine is truly a perfect product because, thanks to its diversity, it can adapt to any situation and, above all, to a wide variety of dishes! Chocolate, so beloved and consumed around the world, first appeared in Europe around the 16th century in the form of a beverage. Brought back from the Americas by Cortés to Spain, it quickly spread throughout European courts as a luxury delicacy. Incompatible with wine at first, these two elements would only be paired later when chocolate began to be produced in various solid forms by the “chocolate industry” of the time. The diversity of flavors found in chocolate might seem incompatible with that found in wine, and yet make no mistake: it is possible!