Fortified wines to pair with the Easter treats

The Guardian

13-04-2025

Vinte Vinte Chocolate and Port Tasting Box, Douro, Portugal NV (from £22, amazon.co.uk; virginwines.co.uk; tanners-wines.co.uk) For those of us who treat Easter as a kind of secular spring-Christmas, featuring similarly liberal doses of chocolate and booze, recent movements in the trades have conspired to make next weekend more expensive than ever. Thanks to a run of poor harvests in west Africa, cocoa prices have been on the rise for years now, but things have become particularly acute this year: according to a recent story in the Guardian, prices of popular Easter eggs are up by as much as 50% on last year, yet many have simultaneously shrunk in size. The wine trade, meanwhile, has been enduring its own battle, with duty hikes and the cost of a new environmental levy among other factors pushing prices up. All of which makes port producer Fladgate's collaboration with Portuguese chocolate brand Vinte Vinte feels like good value: a collection of four 5cl bottles of Taylor's and Fonseca Port, with four 25g bars of chocolate (£22). A grown-up Easter gift that doubles as an introduction to the joys of wine-and-food matching.
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Pellegrino Marsala Superiore Dolce, Marsala, Sicily, Italy NV (£12.50, Morrisons) Port has the necessary robustness, depth of flavour and plenty of sugar to match chocolate's sweetly assertive mouth-coating intensity. But the choice of which port does depend on which kind of chocolate: as the Vinte Vinte kit suggests, the darker-coloured, more darkly fruited LBV and reserve styles (such as the exuberant black forest gateau flavours of Fonseca Bin 27 included in the kit, or the vividly fruity Niepoort Ruby Dum Port NV; £19.50, reservewines.co.uk) are better suited to dark chocolate; more mellow, cask-aged Tawny Ports (such as the kit's 10 Year Old Taylor's or the gorgeously suave multilayered fruit-and-nuts of Graham's 10 Year Old Tawny; £20, Waitrose) are better saved up for milk chocolate. Port doesn't have the monopoly on chocolate combos however. The demerara-and-dates of Pellegrino's Sicilian fortified wine, marsala can easily sub for tawny, while the luscious pure sweet mulberry of a sweet fortified grenache from Roussillon, such as Mas Amiel Maury 2022 (£20.79, 50cl, adnams.co.uk) can stand in for darker ports.
Henriques & Henriques Full Rich Madeira NV (£12.25, 50cl, Waitrose) Easter sweetness isn't all about chocolate. I have yet to find a satisfactory pairing for my own age-inappropriate Easter Sunday habit of nibbling Haribo and jelly babies, with the closest I've come to matching the ruthlessly efficient pleasure centre-targeting mix of refined sugar and industrial-strength tangy acid being the great sweet wines made from riesling in Germany and furmint and other varieties in Tokaj in Hungary. But there are all kinds of possibilities when it comes to finding a wine to drink with the more traditional, almond, marzipan and dried fruit of an Easter Simmel cake, with one of the world's most unfairly overlooked fortified wines, Madeira from the eponymous Portuguese sub-tropical Atlantic Island, at the top of the list. Henriques & Henriques Full Rich Madeira is rich, full, figgy and sweet but balanced with Madeira's trademark acidity; Barbeito Malvasia Reserve 5 Year Old Madeira (£18.95, 50cl, oxfordwine.co.uk; yorkwines.co.uk) is a swish, electrifying elixir of nuts, dried fruit and golden syrup.