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The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Fortified wines to pair with the Easter treats
Vinte Vinte Chocolate and Port Tasting Box, Douro, Portugal NV (from £22, 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. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. 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, 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, 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, is a swish, electrifying elixir of nuts, dried fruit and golden syrup.
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
Can you pair wine with chocolate? Should you? And, if so, which ones go together?
I spend quite a lot of Easter-time licking chocolate out of my molars, and using every reflective surface to check that my teeth haven't dissolved. When chocolate is necessary, so is a wine that cleanses the palate, to drink alongside and to complement its flavours. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Chocolate is one of those foodstuffs that really coats the palate, which can make it difficult to enjoy anything much else; its sweetness can also ramp up the perceived bitterness, alcohol and acidity in a wine, and make it taste disagreeable. And it's those factors that make people think chocolate is rather limited in terms of wine-pairing options. 'The myth of chocolate being a hard pairing is crazy,' says Penny Vine, assistant head sommelier at the Clove Club in London, a restaurant known for its imaginative pairings. 'It works well with about half a dozen things, but not much more than that, and, because you're limited on choice, it's actually really easy to pair.' We are, of course, talking mostly sweet wines here: sauternes, madeira, muscat, tokaji, sweeter rieslings – pick your poison. For dark, bitter chocolate, a deep, rich red is often recommended, because those fresh vegetal notes work with the coolness of the chocolate. Vine also has an unexpected failsafe in her sommelier arsenal: a blanc de noirs champagne (meaning white from black), made with the black champagne grapes pinot noir and pinot meunier. 'Not all of them work, though,' she warns. 'You need the really vinous, ripe-fruit styles that have the richness of red fruit character and enough creaminess and weight. It's a failsafe, because it's not just delicious on its own, it helps a chocolate dish to be delicious as well.' For creamy, milky white chocolate, meanwhile, a demi-sec champagne would also work well, something low acid but with a breadth of flavour (Sainsbury's has a good own-label one). And, of course, there's port, which can be paired well with chocolate in pretty much all of its forms. It's a classic for a reason. Styles will obviously differ from house to house, but the darker a chocolate, the more intense the port needs to be. Think ruby with milk and LBV with something darker. Or, if you want to leave out the guesswork completely (or are of the opinion that it shouldn't just be the kids who get chocolate crucifixion gifts), I recently came across Taylor's nifty little gift set at a Mentzendorff tasting, featuring four ports and four chocolates: Fonseca Bin 27 with 70% dark chocolate, 2019 LBV with 58%, 10-year-old tawny with milk chocolate, and dry white port with white chocolate. I don't have kids, but consuming this in its entirety while a particularly fiendish egg hunt ensues is definitely something I see in my future. Samos Vin Doux Greece 75cl £10 Waitrose, 15%. Greek sweet muscat with hazelnut brittle, chocolate and freshness. Bleasdale Langhorne Creek Sparkling Shiraz £12.76 The Wine Society, 13.5%, Deep, dark fruits in this off-dry Australian sparkling red. Taylor's Miniature Port & Vinte Vinte Chocolate Gift Pack £22 (4 x 50cl) Tanners Wine Merchants. Four miniature Taylor's ports paired with single-estate chocolate. Utopia Ice Cider Patience 2022 £28.50 (375ml) Basket Press Wines, 9.5%. Tarte tatin in a glass: I really enjoy this with any caramel-based desserts and chocolates.
