A Valentine's Day truffle recipe... and the perfect wine to drink with them
February 05, 2016
By Suphada Rom
Prior to working at Tablas Creek, I spent three years working at a small French bistro that was adjacent to a chocolate shop, which was also conveniently co-owned by the owners of the restaurant (pommes frites…check! chocolates…check!). I was in heaven learning not only about our menu, but about the chocolates we produced. As I reflect on my time there, I realized wine and chocolate have really similar foundations. Not unlike a vineyard, cacao farms can vary from plot to plot, and more so from one country to the next. I tasted single origin chocolates from all over South America, each bringing their own exciting aromas and nuances. With both quality wine and chocolate, there is an incredible sense of terroir that is truly amazing to taste. A certain minerality you find in a bottle of wine could be considered equivalent to the nutty nuance you find in a bar of chocolate. You can only imagine our excitement when we decided to pair the two together, creating what may be one of the best wine and dessert pairings I’ve ever had.
Chocolate truffles with our 2003 Sacrérouge.
When I first played around with the idea of pairing wine with chocolate, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Chocolate is such a powerful product to work with, given its rich quality and often overly sweet connotation. Some of my favorite chocolate desserts are the most simple, but made with the highest quality ingredients. This truffle recipe by King Arthur Flour (from my home state of Vermont!) requires only chocolate and heavy cream to make the centers, leaving you free to coat them with just about anything you want. The chocolate ganache is smooth and rich, but not cloyingly sweet. Adding nuts or some sort of a crunchy exterior will also break up the overall smooth texture, however there were no complaints about the traditional chocolate dipped ones! Here are some photos from our truffle efforts:
Toppings in preparation of coating every square (okay, maybe round) inch of each truffle
After about 2 truffles, your hands may look like this. I spy some Rebecca Haas jewelry beneath the layer of chocolate.
A dipped truffle that we managed to not eat, however due to lack of self control, many truffles were harmed in the making of this blog post.
The wine that we chose to pair the truffles with was our Vin de Paille Sacrérouge. Sacrérouge is a small production dessert wine made from 100% Mourvèdre. It is produced through the meticulous vin de paille process, where the grapes are hand harvested at peak ripeness (but not superripe like a late harvest) and laid out on beds of straw to dehydrate. During this process the grapes concentrate and gather in complexity and character. The results, after a slow oak fermentation, is a sweet wine that brings richness with incredible balance. The 2003 Sacrérouge (which we chose for this pairing) was our first-ever bottling of this dessert wine. We were really thrilled with how this wine was drinking. It had incredibly deep notes of cherry and cassis, with a beautiful mineral quality on the finish. The youthful quality of this wine is what really had everyone talking -- this wine was still vibrant after over a decade in bottle. A bite of truffle and a sip of wine later, we were all relatively speechless. It was a fantastic pairing. That said, these truffles would be excellent with any vintage of our Sacrérouge, young or old.
The finished product with our 2003 Sacrérouge, and yes, this picture perfect set up lasted all of 10 seconds before we dove in!
If you have a Sacrérouge in your cellar to enjoy with the truffles you'll be whipping up it’s sure to be a pairing you’ll never forget. If you recreate this dessert (or create a TCV wine and food pairing of your own!), be sure to let us know on any of our social media handles- Facebook or Twitter or Instagram - or just leave us a comment here! When you do, tag @tablascreek and use #EatDrinkTablas
A few other resources:
- The recipe for the truffles can be found here
- If you’d like to learn more about the Vin de Paille method, check out this blog post written by Jason Haas entitled Vin de Paille: A Dessert Wine Making Technique for the Obsessed