Pairing · 4.2

Port and dark chocolate: why this one works

Fortification leaves sugar and adds alcohol, satisfying the sugar rule with room to spare, and the chocolate’s fat takes the tannin.

Behind a multi-day event, organisers can also compare operational tools for productivity tracking software.

Port with dark chocolate is the pairing everybody names, and it is named because it is the easiest correct answer available. The interesting part is why it is correct, because the reasons generalise and the pairing itself does not.

What port is

A wine whose fermentation was stopped part way through by the addition of grape spirit. The yeast are killed before they finish, so the sugar they had not yet consumed remains, and the alcohol arrives at around twenty per cent rather than the thirteen or fourteen of a table wine.

Everything that makes it work with chocolate follows from that single piece of process.

Rule one, satisfied comprehensively

The residual sugar is high enough that almost no chocolate outranks it. The sugar rule, which defeats most pairings, is not merely satisfied but satisfied with a margin, and that margin is what makes the combination forgiving.

You can pair a port with a sweet milk chocolate and with a seventy-five per cent bar and both work, which is unusual and is why the pairing became the standard recommendation.

Rule two, in both directions

A young ruby port carries real tannin from skins and from its short but intense fermentation. On its own it grips.

Cocoa butter takes it, and the darker chocolate that most people reach for is generous with butter, so the tannin has somewhere to go. The wine softens in the presence of the food, which is the effect the entry on tannin describes.

The styles are not interchangeable

Ruby and late-bottled styles are fresh, fruited and tannic, and they want dark chocolate. Tawny styles have spent years in wood, oxidising, and taste of nuts, dried fruit and caramel; they want milk chocolate, caramel, and anything with nuts in it.

Putting a tawny against a very dark bar is the common mistake. The wine's delicacy is flattened and its oxidative character reads as tired next to something so intense.

The temperature nobody gets right

Port is routinely served at the temperature of a warm room, which at twenty per cent alcohol means the spirit arrives first and stays.

Ruby styles want to be a little cooler than a red table wine. Tawny styles benefit from being properly cool, around twelve to fourteen degrees, which surprises people because it is a sweet wine and they expect the opposite.

Half an hour in a fridge transforms most bottles of tawny, and it is the single most useful thing in this entry.

The size of the pour

At twenty per cent, a normal glass of port contains close to twice the alcohol of a normal glass of table wine. The traditional small glass is not decoration; it is arithmetic.

At a tasting where several fortified wines are poured, this is worth holding in mind, and it is the reason spitting is more common on that part of a floor than elsewhere.

The local version

Fortified wines are made in this state from muscadine, in a comparable style and by the same process, and they do the same job against chocolate for the same reasons.

They taste nothing like port, because the grape is a different species, and a visitor who likes the combination in its familiar form should ask for the local one on principle. It is the most direct demonstration this festival offers of the argument the journal has been making.

What else satisfies the same conditions

Any wine with real sweetness and enough body: late harvest styles, some sherries, madeira, and the sweeter sparkling wines the entry on sweetness describes. Each brings something different and each clears the same two bars.

The point of understanding why port works is that it stops being the only answer. It is the first correct answer, and there are a dozen others on any well-stocked floor.

The short version

Fortification leaves sugar and adds alcohol, which satisfies the sugar rule with room to spare, and the chocolate's fat takes the tannin. Ruby for dark, tawny for milk, and cooler than you are serving it.

What age does to it

A bottled ruby style is ready when it is sold and changes little afterwards. Vintage styles are bottled young and unfiltered and are expected to develop for decades in the bottle, throwing a sediment that needs decanting.

Tawny styles have done their ageing in wood before bottling, which is why an age statement on one refers to the average age of the blend and why the bottle does not improve further once opened and stoppered.

How long an open bottle lasts

Longer than table wine, because the alcohol and sugar both slow oxidation, and not indefinitely. A tawny keeps for weeks in the fridge and a ruby for something like a week.

Which makes fortified wine the practical thing to open at home for two people who want one glass each with something sweet, and the entry on running a tasting for friends returns to that.

The glass

A small glass, filled to about a third, leaving room for the aroma to collect. The traditional narrow port glass concentrates it, and any small wine glass does nearly as well.

Filling a small glass to the brim is the common error and it removes the headspace that the aromatics need, which for a wine this aromatic costs more than it would elsewhere.

If you want one bottle for the cupboard

A tawny. It keeps for weeks once open, wants only a small pour, suits milk chocolate and nuts, and improves considerably from half an hour in the fridge before serving.

Also in this part

• 1.1

  Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight

  The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.

  Read it →
• 1.2

  Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth

  Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

  Read it →

For further context, see Port and Douro Wines Institute.