February has arrived and with it comes the romantic promise of Valentine’s Day. What better to enjoy with your beloved than the taste of fine, sweet wine? Sweet wines have been sadly looked down upon of late, mostly owing to mass-produced wines like white zinfandel, or the sickly sweet moscatos that flow through the aisles of our supermarkets. Yuck. Just let them flow right past you.
The sweet wines you should take note of have nothing to do with the cheap, sugary stuff people consume as sort of an alcoholic equivalent to Coca Cola. World-class sweet wines are refined and elegant and can be served at the finest of tables with great pride. Because Valentine’s Day is associated with beautiful gifts of decadent chocolates, it is well advised to offer your true love an equally decadent wine. The perfect wine to pair with chocolate, be it milk chocolate or dark chocolate, is aged tawny port.
There is some confusion about the pairing of chocolates with wine. Many insist that chocolate can be happily paired with a dry red wine, such as red zinfandel or syrah. This is, sadly, incorrect. The firm and fast rule is that the wine must always be sweeter than the dessert with which it is served. Chocolate is decidedly sweet and the sweetness of the candy will make any dry red wine taste bitter on the palate.
The same rule holds fast for Champagne. Once upon a time when Champagne was a sweet, sparkling wine, it DID pair nicely with desserts such as chocolate. But nowadays, it’s difficult to find a sweet (“doux”) Champagne at all and a dry Champagne served with chocolates is never the right choice. As with the dry red wine, a dry Champagne will seem bitter when consumed with chocolate, and what a terrible waste of good champagne that would be.
But the lovers of the world should not despair. Aged tawny port is the answer to their Valentine’s prayers. With a luscious sweetness and sumptuous notes of caramel and walnuts, aged tawny port effortlessly highlights the flavors of fine chocolate and warms the hearts of all who dare to sip its sweet perfection.
Port has been produced in the Douro Valley in northern Portugal for hundreds of years and never goes out of style. The grapes used to create port include Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz, and Tinta Cao, as well as up to 80 other local Portuguese varieties. Port is a fortified wine, meaning that the wine has been strengthened or “fortified” with a colorless grape spirit during the winemaking process. The addition of this grape spirit stops the fermentation process of the natural grape sugars, thereby making the wine sweet. Port is usually around 22% alcohol as a result of fortification.
Aged tawny port gets its reddish amber color from barrel aging. The bottle will be labeled to indicate the age of the wine: 10, 20, 30, or 40 years. The wood of the barrel affects the color of the wine and imparts warm, spicy flavors as well as creating a decadent, silky complexity on the palate. It is a perfect pairing with any sort of chocolate, as well as rich desserts such as crème brulee, pecan pie, or salted caramel.
This Valentine’s Day, bring a touch of class to your gift giving and include a fine bottle of tawny port with that box of chocolates. It might just be true love.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Cheers!
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