More on Wine & Chocolate

Filed in archive Food and Wine on February 14, 2007

Today was so not the day to start counting calories again for my never-ending diet! Seriously, I really started doing that today. Then my sweetie husband handed me a box of chocolate and informed me he has some champagne chilling and a new jar of caviar! Yikes! How can I resist!?

Chocolate - wine - good food - oy! It was nice to see that I'm not the only wine lover who has a sweet tooth, and I thought this article about a vintner who turned chocolate maker makes a lot of sense.

From Chocolatiers' many dark sides appeal to consumers:

John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg launched the first U.S. chocolate manufacturing company in a half-century, drawing heavily on Scharffenberger's refined palate and his past as a maker of sparkling wines.

Together, they set out to do for dark chocolate what fellow Californian Robert Mondavi had done for wine - demystify, democratize and domesticate it.

Call it kismet, uncanny timing or creative chemistry, but in the 11 years since co-founding Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, they have watched the public's appetite for gourmet chocolate expand from a Valentine's Day extravagance to an everyday indulgence.

``We've gone through a food revolution in this country,'' said Scharffenberger. Just as Americans have become more sophisticated about wine, other products that once were the luxury of certified foodies, such as whole-bean coffee and artisan cheeses, have been mainstreamed to the masses.

``The one thing that remained to be done was chocolate, and that's what we hit on,'' Scharffenberger said.

Like the label of a fine wine, the wrapper on a Scharffen Berger chocolate tells you exactly what's inside.