Chocolate and muscadel

There hasn’t been much food and wine pairing going on in the Beckett household this week as I lost my sense of taste with Covid - fortunately for only four days - but I tasted a wine yesterday that I know would make the perfect match with chocolate.

It’s a South African sweet red wine called Muscadel aka muscat and it’s not widely available in the UK but you can buy it as part of the Banks Brothers range.

What I particularly like about it is that it’s bottled young and at a lower ABV than port which gives it a really lovely fresh berry fruit flavour that would be great with chocolate.

At £19.50 for three 250ml cans it’s not cheap but it would make a perfect Easter treat to give someone along with their Easter egg. You can also buy it by the bottle. Frontier Fine Wines sells the Rustenberg for £10.50 a half bottle. It would be good to see more of it here.

Photo ©Jessica Loaiza on Unsplash

Coffee and chocolate

This week’s match of the week might sound blindingly obvious but it’s taken to a level I haven’t encountered before.

Mind you you’d expect nothing else from chef Ashley Palmer-Watts who used to be Heston Blumenthal’s right hand man at The Fat Duck and more recently at Dinner

He’s now branched out on his own and developed a range of coffees under the Artisan Coffee label. Each is accompanied by a different chocolate which is designed to echo the flavours of the coffee

I’ve only worked my way through four of the six combinations so far (to avoid being permanently wired I’m restricting myself to one a day) but am really enjoying the different pairings, especially his advice to let the chocolate melt on your tongue as you sip the coffee.

The coffees will shortly be available in teabag-like bags so you can easily make yourself a mug though as I grind my own beans I tried those out too. (They also come in pods and as bags of ground coffee - you can see the full range on the website though some products are not yet available)

My favourite combinations so far are the Heroine which comes with a chocolate disc flavoured with caramel and hazelnuts and the Enigma which is paired with a chocolate with raspberry, raisin and apricot (all have a little bit of crunch). I’m not sure either would work quite as well with milk and/or sugar - the chocolate really does the job of sweetening the drink - but that’s my own personal taste. The idea is to make coffee accessible rather than geeky.

If you're a coffee-lover you might also enjoy my post on What food to pair with coffee

I was sent the coffee and chocolate as a press sample.

Chocolate truffles and PX

You can tell how much I love sherry from the fact that this is the second week running a food pairing involving sherry has been my match of the week.

Actually it could even have been the second consecutive week for palo cortado (this time with an aged Manchego) but I thought that might be overdoing it!

So it’s unctuous chocolate truffles with sweet raisiny Pedro Ximenez aka PX - in this case Gonzalez Byass Nectar.

The pairing was one of six in a sherry event for which I collaborated with my local tapas bar, Bar 44 which, like their Cardiff bars, is closed for the time being. Owen Morgan, who presented the tasting with me, co-owns the bars with his brother Tom and sister Natalie and is a complete sherry fanatic, known on Twitter and Instagram as @sherrymonster44.

The truffles, which contained indecent amounts of chocolate and cream along with a dusting of grilled hazelnuts, were also insanely good. So rich you (or at least, I) couldn’t manage more than a couple with a couple of accompanying sips which suits PX just perfectly.

For other PX pairings see here or to buy a copy of my sherry ebook click here.

Chocolate layer cake and single vineyard rioja

I’ve always been sceptical about the combination of red wine and chocolate but I came across one in Moscow last week that was simply sensational

I was in there to present a talk on food and wine pairing for the annual Spanish Wine Academy Rioja producer Ramon Bilbao organises for the sommeliers there. It was an impressive event with a high turnout - Russian sommeliers are really keen to learn more about wine.

In the evening we had a dinner at a very smart restaurant called Selection where the chef Ramon Bilbao had brought with them, Ignacio Echapresto of Venta Moncalvillo, cooked a five course meal which we matched with a range of contemporary Spanish wines. The red in question was the 2014 vintage of one of Ramon Bilbao’s top wines called Mirto, a beautifully poised, ripe modern rioja that you’d be more inclined to pair with a main course

The dessert, a light but intensely flavoured chocolate cake was sandwiched with ganache and (I think) a touch of red fruit jelly which chimed in beautifully with the Mirto. Generally a wine needs to be sweeter than a dessert to work but this was just perfect.

I still wouldn’t open a red of this quality just to drink with dessert but if you’re drinking a similar wine with the main course you could happily save a sip for a chocolate cake or even a square of dark chocolate.

Disclosure: I was paid by Ramon Bilbao to present the wines (but not asked to write about them.)