7th July is International Chocolate Day - happy tasting!
What a perfect time to match your wine and chocolate as we celebrate International Chocolate Day. Open a bottle, pick yourself up some chocolate, and work out which is your favourite combination.
If you’ve got a Cabernet Sauvignon, it will work beautifully with dark chocolate – those with 70% to 100% cacao. Because Cabernet Sauvignon is generally full-bodied, it needs to be matched with intense flavours, so turning up the cocoa content in the chocolate is key.
The fruit intensity and medium to full bodied nature of your Shiraz makes for a rich and mouth-filling combination. The key is starting with a chocolate with over 50% cocoa content and matching the general fruit flavours of the wine to a complementary chocolate flavour.
With a Sparkling Red, pick yourself up some milk chocolate. Its smaller percentage of cacao and mild, sweet taste, matches to the complex savoury characters of the sparkling.
If it’s Riesling or a Sparkling White that you’ve got at home, they will both complement the vanilla, caramel and honey flavours of white chocolate.
As each one of us has a unique palate, likes and dislikes, the only proven way to find your favourite chocolate and wine match is to experiment and we all know what a tough job that will be!
