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WTN: 1999 Vintage Port, Smith Woodhouse

Chocolate Cake and Wine How do you pair wine and food? This was Clotilde's unspoken question when she announced her theme for Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly tasting group that meets across the blogs of the world. Pair some wine with a dense chocolate cake, she said. She even provided a recipe, though I went a different route and made the flourless chocolate cake from Alice Medrich's A Year in Chocolate.

Pairing food and wine makes everyone nervous. But here is the great secret: It doesn't actually matter that much. Sure, there are a handful of guidelines you can use, but it's ludicrous to believe that one particular bottle of wine is the only perfect, made-in-heaven match for your dinner. Few pairings are revelatory, just as few really clash. Here's what food expert extraordinaire Ed Behr said in The Art of Eating, Issue 64, in response to a letter from David Schildknecht:

Not that there is a better drink with food than wine, but the two don't complement each other nearly as much as we are almost everywhere led to believe. Yes, some foods go extremely well with wine: a roast chicken goes with almost any wine. But perfect matches are extremely rare.

He goes on to argue that, in fact, food and wine often diminish each other's flavors, meaning that each is more flavorful on its own than with its companion.

So I use a simple strategy and just roll with it. When I'm considering a wine to serve with a dish, I look at the structure and intensity of each. You want your food and your wine to be equal partners. As an extreme example, you would not serve a dense, heavy Cabernet Sauvignon with your delicately flavored white fish. Nor would you pair a lightweight, aperitif wine with a thick slab of steak. For the thick, fudgy cake I made, the "modern classics" would be a Zinfandel or, perhaps, a jammier Cabernet Sauvignon.

But I often prefer the "classic classics," and so I went with a vintage Port, a fortified wine with plenty of structure that's capable of intense flavors. Port vintages only happen three or four times a decade, when the wine makers decide that the wine from a given year is good enough to justify the prestige of vintage Port (technically, each house decides on its own, but it's unusual for one estate to declare a vintage alone). Vintage Ports (which are always ruby, and thus unoxidized, ports) can age for decades, but mine was from 1999, and thus very young. You could tell. The aromas were still closed up, offering just hints of dried fruit and cinnamon. It's a wine I'd like to try again in twenty years. And since it's $31 now, maybe I should pick up a couple bottles and put them in our wine cellar.

How did it go with the chocolate cake? Well, that's an interesting question. Fatemeh and C. were kind enough to let me force my chocolate cake onto them, and they provided a Madeira we could try. I'll let her tell you about that, but the Madeira was probably a better match for the cake (certainly it was showing better that night). On the other hand, the raspberry sauce I served with the chocolate cake shifted things back into my bottle's court. It was interesting to see how the combinations worked.

Thanks to C. from Gastronomie for the picture!

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