
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.”
Read More »

Brix chocolate is specially designed to pair with wine. If you’re not a wine drinker, you might wonder what this could mean. I didn’t drink alcohol when I was younger, and didn’t understand what people meant about how food and wine went together. When I learned to drink much later in life I figured out how they should have explained it to me: Cookies and milk.
Cookies are good without milk, and milk is fine without cookies. But put together, they’re both even better. Cookies and milk isn’t just good + good = 2 goods. Put together, they’re a whole new thing, more than the sum of their parts. And once you get used to the combination, a cookie feels a little incomplete without the milk. A cookie makes you wish for a glass of milk. Without it, the experience feels incomplete. It’s just not as good as it could be.
Well, no matter what kinds of pretentious nonsense you have read about wine, it’s the same deal. Some foods just go really well with wine the way a cookie goes really well with milk. Some whole cuisines are designed to taste good with wine, like Italian and French, and once you get used to the combination, an Italian dinner seems incomplete without a glass of wine.
So, I wondered if this was true of Brix chocolate. I was a little skeptical about the concept, because although I do drink wine with dinner, I don’t usually drink it with dessert. A hot cup of tea is what goes with dessert, for me. (Or, of course, milk, if dessert is cookies.) After a lifetime of eating chocolate this way, had I been missing something? That might be kind of cool, actually. So I had an open mind.
Read More »