St. Valentine’s Day raises a few wine issues, and here are a some thoughts in time for you to plan oenologically for the evening.
There’s that old question of which wine goes well with chocolate. I don’t know how many people or couples really sit down to a meal of chocolate and a bottle of wine, but chocolate is the gift du jour on Feb. 14, and wine often seems to be in the picture, too.
Although you’ll sometimes see some red wines advertised as good matches for chocolate, I’ve never been convinced. Whether it’s white, milk or dark, whether it’s plain or studded with nuts or filled with nougat, chocolate has such intensely sweet ( and sometime bitter) flavours that it tends to wash the fruit out of even the biggest, most concentrated, fruitdriven red wine. You’re left with such a thin and often acid- dominant mouthful that you quickly reach for another bite of chocolate to kill the rancid taste in your mouth.
And don’t be taken in by wine reviews that list “ chocolate” among their descriptors. It’s almost always just a fleeting hint and certainly not a primary flavour that might cope with the real stuff. ( I’ve only ever tasted one wine — a Nero d’Avola from Sicily — that had substantial chocolate flavours. It tasted like a mouthful of milk chocolate.)
What you really need is not a wine with chocolate notes, but a wine that has the sweetness to match chocolate. And that really drives you toward fortified reds with fairly high residual sugar. One of the most popular is port but another — and for my money, this is a much better partner for chocolate — is Banyuls.
Like port, Banyuls is fortified and, for that matter, it can taste a bit like port. But it’s made predominantly from the Grenache variety and in the hot, dry Banyuls region the grapes deliver intense flavours with high alcohol. If you’ve ever tasted a 100- per- cent Grenache ( try one from the Collioure appellation, near Banyuls) you’ll know it as delivering rich red fruit flavours with a characteristic sweet core. It’s probably this sweetness that makes Banyuls the best partner for chocolate.
Banyuls, which is classed as a Vin Doux Naturel, is made in a small region around the town of Banyuls- sur- Mer on the Mediterranean coast of France, just a few kilometres from the Spanish border. Alcohol is added while the juice is still on its skins, with the result that the finished wine has a lot of complex fruit and secondary flavours. Banyuls is aged for a long period, and in some cases it’s aged outside in the hot summer and develops rancio aromas and flavours ( similar to some sherries).
Until now, except for occasional releases through Vintages, we’ve had to look for Banyuls across the river in the SAQ. The good news is that some Banyuls have been added to the LCBO inventory, and I am reviewing two today. They’re part of a broader range of sweet wines from the south of France that the LCBO has just put on the shelves. I’ll look at the others in another column.
Today, four wines you might consider for Valentines Day, two of them Banyuls.