• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Two of the finest wines for chocolate, Maury and Banyuls, come from remote Roussillon in France’s deep southeast. These so-called vins doux naturels are made (mostly) from late-picked Grenache grown on steep, terraced, wind-scoured hillsides near the Spanish border. The standard-bearing Banyuls estate is Domaine du Mas Blanc, one of the world’s most famous obscure domaines. I first tasted this wine at JoJo, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s pioneering New York bistro, alongside the warm Valrhona chocolate cake, a nearly erotic experience that I try to re-create at least once a year. (And I’m a guy who doesn’t usually even bother with dessert.)

Banyuls’s neighboring appellation Maury also produces a chocolate-loving vin doux. The village cooperative makes the classic example; I recently had, alongside Le Bernardin’s warm chocolate tart, a 1929 that was spectacular, with lots of caramel, date, coffee, and vanilla flavors, plus an oxidized Sherry note, which the French and Spanish call rancio. The finest estate in Maury is Mas Amiel (which once traded hands in a card game), producers of several cuvées of heady Maury, including one raised in the traditional manner of the region, spending a year outdoors in huge glass demijohns, exposed to the extremes of the Roussillon climate. The demand for these labor-intensive wines, like that for most sweet wines, has been static in the past few decades (Mas Amiel is increasingly focusing on the production of dry table wines), and prices remain modest when compared with Vintage Port or Sauternes.

America’s answer to Banyuls and Recioto is late-harvest Zinfandel—a fairly rare, sweet style of Zin that is eminently delicious with chocolate, the darker and more bitter the better. This is a good general rule: chocolate with a high cocoa content and a lower milk and sugar content is the most complex, intense, and wine-friendly. As for the desserts, the more complicated they get, the harder they will be to match. Chocolate already has some five hundred flavor compounds— how many more do you need? A chocolate soufflé is a beautiful thing, but it’s hard to improve upon a simple piece of Valrhona, Bernachon, or Scharffen Berger dark chocolate, unless of course you pour a Madeira or a Maury alongside it.

PROVENÇAL PINK

Not the least pleasure of wine is its mnemonic quality—its madeleine-like ability to reawaken previous pleasures, to transport us back in time and place. If I fail, as seems likely, to make it physically to Provence this summer, I will revisit it often in memory—whenever I open a bottle of rosé. Rosé is made in most of the world’s wine regions, but in my mind it will always be evocative of southern France, of the fragrant villages between Avignon and Cannes, and of the food of that region.

Several of my most memorable meals have been washed down with rosé, none more satisfying than a lunch at a tiny restaurant near the village of Apt. I’d just spent two days tasting the ′98 vintage in Châteauneuf-du-Pape—huge red tannic monsters. My mouth was still puckered with tannin as I set out with a friend that morning from Avignon for a little R & R— honest, wine tasting is work—in Peter Mayle country. Someone had recommended a stop at Mas Tourteron, but I don’t recall any great expectations when we finally disembarked in the dusty parking lot in the midst of a cherry orchard after innumerable wrong turns. (Forget about your Michelin map in Provence—it doesn’t work.) We entered the gate of a walled-in courtyard that dwarfed the farmhouse to which it was attached.

The courtyard was hushed and deserted, a few rough farm tables scattered on the lawn among the trees. Birdcages were mounted on the walls and the trees. The fragrance from scattered flowerbeds was almost narcotic. The pleasant spell was eventually broken with the arrival of Philippe Baique, the deeply tanned, silver-haired husband of chef Elisabeth Bourgeois; he offered us our pick of the tables and returned with the menus and the wine list, which included superstars