On the tongue · 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.
For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, Monitask offers a concise companion guide.
The rule you have probably been given is that red wine goes with dark chocolate. It is true often enough to be repeated and it is not the reason, and knowing the reason is what lets you predict the cases the rule gets wrong.
The sugar rule
Sweetness is comparative. When something sweeter arrives in your mouth than the thing you are drinking, the drink loses its own sweetness by comparison, and what remains is its acid and its tannin. A pleasant dry red becomes thin, sharp and faintly metallic, and nothing has changed about the wine.
This is why a dry red against a milk chocolate truffle is unpleasant and why the same wine against a very dark bar is not. The bar is barely sweet, so it does not outrank the wine, so the wine keeps its shape.
The rule in one line: the wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.
What tannin is doing
Tannin is the drying, gripping sensation across your gums and the inside of your cheeks. It is not a taste; it is a texture, produced by compounds that bind to the proteins in your saliva and to fat.
Give tannin fat to bind to and it stops gripping you. That is why red wine works with a fatty steak, and it is why a chocolate with a high cocoa butter content softens a tannic wine that would be harsh on its own.
Which produces the interesting case: a very dark, very dry, low-fat bar and a very tannic young red is two astringent things meeting, and they multiply rather than cancel.
Temperature, which nobody measures
Warmth makes alcohol more volatile, so a red served at a warm room temperature smells and tastes of spirit before it tastes of fruit. Cold suppresses aroma and makes tannin feel harder, so an over-chilled red seems both mute and rough.
The useful range for most reds is cooler than most rooms and warmer than most fridges. Twenty minutes in the fridge before pouring corrects almost every red served in a heated room in February, which is exactly the condition of an indoor festival in Wilmington.
Chocolate has its own range, and it is narrower. Below about sixteen degrees the fat is firm enough that the flavour arrives late; above about twenty-two it begins to soften and the texture takes over. Held in the hand for a minute, a cool bar comes into range on its own.
The three, in a table
| Variable | Too little | Too much | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sugar in the wine, relative to the food | Wine tastes sour and thin | Pairing tastes cloying and flat | Match, or let the wine lead |
| Fat in the chocolate, relative to the tannin | Tannin grips and dries | Wine disappears behind the butter | Darker and drier wants softer and rounder |
| Temperature | Aroma shut down, tannin hard | Alcohol dominates, fruit flattens | Twenty minutes in the fridge, and a minute in the hand |
Why this replaces the rules
Port with dark chocolate is not a tradition; it is the sugar rule satisfied, with enough sweetness in the glass to outrank the bar, and enough fat in the bar to take the tannin. Sparkling wine with chocolate usually fails because most sparkling wine is dry and most chocolate is not.
Once you have the three, you can work out any pairing at the table without having read anything about it, which is the whole point of arriving at a tasting knowing them.
Why the rule spread anyway
Because it is right about the commonest case. Most chocolate people encounter is sweet, most red wine sold is dry, and the pairing people reach for first is the one that fails, so somebody eventually said "dark chocolate with red wine" and it worked often enough to become received.
What it cannot do is tell you what to do when the chocolate is a milk bar with sea salt, or when the wine is an off-dry rosé, or when both are in front of you at a table and nobody has labelled anything. The three variables handle all of those and the rule handles none of them.
Which one leads
There is a choice hidden in the sugar rule. You can move the wine up to meet the chocolate, by choosing something sweeter, or move the chocolate down to meet the wine, by choosing something darker and less sweet.
Both work and they produce different results. A sweet wine against a sweet chocolate is rich and can be cloying; a dry wine against a very dark bar is austere and can be bracing. Deciding which you want before you start is more useful than any list of specific pairings.
Two mouthfuls that teach it
Take any dry red and a milk chocolate. Taste the wine, then the chocolate, then the wine again. The second sip is thin and sharp, and you have just watched the sugar rule work on a wine you liked a moment ago.
Then do the same with a bar above seventy per cent. The second sip is recognisably the wine you started with. Nothing else in this journal needs demonstrating as cheaply.
Also in this part
- 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 → - 1.3
Temperature, the variable nobody measures
Every serving range is below the temperature of a heated room, which is what twenty minutes in the fridge is for.
Read it →
For further context, see Wine Folly pairing guide.