In my review of Brix milk chocolate – a line of chocolate that is specially designed to go with wine – I tested the combination and was unimpressed, and I said that I thought dark chocolate would be more likely to go with wine in a meaningful way.
Well, it just so happened that our esteemed editor had received a sample of what Brix calls “medium dark.” Being as she has a terrible, tragic disability – she doesn’t like dark chocolate, the poor dear – it seemed sensible for her to pass it on to me.
The Brix medium dark suggested pairing is with zinfandel, syrah, rhone, merlot, or shiraz. I wouldn’t know what those have in common – I admit I tend to choose wines by whether they have a good picture of an animal on the bottle – but the label explains, “the smooth cacao pairs perfectly with lighter, fruit-flavored wines, enhancing their aroma.”
As I explained in my earlier review via an extended discussion of cookies and milk, the point of something like this should be that the wine and chocolate together have some kind of taste interaction, that the individual parts are different in the combination than apart. This didn’t strike me as true with the milk chocolate, but in this case, it definitely did: The chocolate tasted better with the wine than without.
This was a good thing, actually, because I didn’t like this chocolate without the wine at all. It lacked something that I like in a good dark chocolate, tasting kind of flat. Maybe what was missing was you’d call fruitiness, in fact, so it would make sense that’s what the “fruit-flavored” type of wine made up for. I didn’t have the impression that the wine was better with the chocolate, but the chocolate was definitely better with the wine, so the combination was more than the sum of its parts, as I complained the milk chocolate-wine pairing wasn’t.
I was glad I got to try this. It didn’t make me want to have my chocolate with wine all the time, but it was an interesting experience. I still think the best application of this product is as a gift for a wine drinker, but this one’s a better choice than the milk chocolate. Just make sure he or she is the kind of person who really is likely to eat it with wine, because otherwise, you’d be better off getting them another kind of dark chocolate that can stand on its own better.
Buy Brix Chocolate Online:
- at Amazon.com
Can’t say that I’d be keen on chocolate that requires a co-star. Can’t be that great, really.
February 5th, 2009 at 5:44 pm