Your guide to sparkling wine & chocolate

Chocolate and bubbles may seem like a brilliant combination, but often your match will end up as a fateful blind date in your mouth! The classic combination of chocolate and other sweets, together with delicious bubbles, is often experienced at celebrations where everything needs to be a little extra delicious; student parties, New Year's Eve, weddings, etc.

But, but, but…

The challenge with bubbles and chocolate is that both products are dominant, which means they will fight for space. So the intention to add a little extra color to the party will rarely succeed in terms of taste. But it can actually be done if you just think about it a little. To get a successful match between bubbles and chocolate, there are a few basic rules to follow that make it possible, and often a really good experience.

 

Rule no.1 - The wine should feel sweeter than the chocolate!

Dark chocolate with a very high cocoa content can be difficult to find a partner for, and we therefore recommend that the chocolate never exceeds 70% cocoa content. Dark chocolate with a higher cocoa percentage, and thus less sugar, will, together with the sparkling wine, enhance the bitter substances in both. This is because sparkling wine generally has a high acid content. This acid breaks down the fat in the chocolate and highlights the bitterness of the chocolate. However, the experience of the bitterness caused by the influence of the wine's acid and residual sugar will be experienced much less at a lower cocoa percentage.

A good match for dark chocolate could be Cava Reserva Brut, for example, which, due to the cava's warm climate and characteristic grape composition (Macabeo, Xarel-lo and Parellada), is perceived as sweeter than one would initially think. In fact, the taste that the cocoa in the dark chocolate and cava brut achieves in interaction is truly delicate. Try, for example, Miquel Pons Reserva Brut .