Abstract
What do wine and chocolates have in common? Sure, a nice red wine goes well with a smooth, dark chocolate, but let’s dig deeper into the raw materials. The grape and the cocoa bean, from which wine and chocolate are derived, are both plant products whose characteristics vary with each harvest. The quality of both grapes and cocoa beans, and therefore wine and chocolate, depends on environmental factors like rainfall, sunshine, and temperature, which affect the chemical composition within the raw materials.
Not published as a column in The Capital Times
What do wine and chocolates have in common? Sure, a nice red wine goes well with a smooth, dark chocolate, but let’s dig deeper into the raw materials. The grape and the cocoa bean, from which wine and chocolate are derived, are both plant products whose characteristics vary with each harvest. The quality of both grapes and cocoa beans, and therefore wine and chocolate, depends on environmental factors like rainfall, sunshine, and temperature, which affect the chemical composition within the raw materials.
You know from experience that not every grape is equally sweet and delectable – sometimes there are sour grapes or even grapes that look delicious, but have little flavor. The same variability is also found in cocoa beans. In fact, almost all fruits and vegetables experience some degree of variability from harvest to harvest.
Vineyards use the variability in grapes, from year to year and region to region, by making vintage wines with unique character. Wine from a good vintage year can be a lot different from the same wine made in a different year. Despite that same variability in cocoa beans, however, chocolate manufacturers generally want their chocolate to taste the same no matter what.
In fact, most food processors work with variable raw materials, yet must produce a consistent product. This variability is what makes the food processing industry unique from many other processing industries. Food manufacturers somehow must accommodate differences in their raw materials to make a product that tastes, looks, and feels the same day after day.
How do the large chocolate makers account for variability in the cocoa bean to produce the same product year in and year out?
Chocolate makers have chocolate tasters, who go to the source to taste the raw materials. Sounds like a great job, doesn’t it. Unfortunately, chocolate tasters taste the cocoa beans and not the finished chocolate. Chocolate liquor is ground-up cocoa beans, but despite being called liquor, there’s no alcohol in it to offset the bitterness. Chocolate liquor makes your mouth pucker so badly that it makes those sour candies seem sweet. Try some yourself – its often called Baker’s chocolate.
These brave chocolate tasters evaluate beans from various sources and select those beans that they know from experience will give the taste they are looking for. Chocolate makers then blend beans to wipe away differences in individual batches, and produce a consistent product. To some extent, chocolate makers can also manipulate process conditions, like roasting temperatures, to make sure their chocolate tastes the same regardless of the differences in cocoa beans.
In fact, if food manufacturers knew enough about the chemistry of their products, they could adjust conditions to offset differences in raw materials and make a consistent product. For example, grape juice manufacturers, working with the same grape variability as the vintner, are capable of producing juice with a consistent taste.
Grape juice producers use an approach called standardization, where the chemical composition of the raw material is adjusted to ensure uniformity of the important factors that affect their product. They measure acidity, sugar content, and a variety of other parameters, and then blend juices from different sources with different levels of these parameters to make a product that tastes the same all year round, despite huge differences in grape quality.
Perhaps, the day is coming when we can eat a vintage chocolate with a vintage wine. In fact, varietal or single-origin chocolates, which celebrate the intricate differences of taste of a specific bean from a specific growing region, are a growing trend.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hartel, R.W., Hartel, A. (2008). Vintage Wines and Chocolates. In: Food Bites. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-75845-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-75845-9_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-75844-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-75845-9
eBook Packages: Chemistry and Materials ScienceChemistry and Material Science (R0)