Becoming a Master Sommelier is no small feat—only 230 people have passed it since the first exam was held in 1969. With three parts, including a blind tasting of six wines, this exam qualifies as one of the most difficult in the world, period. It’s safe to say that these men and women have some of the best palates in the world—well qualified to pair the perfect wine with your food.
Pascaline Lepeltier is one of these people. Except her job is even more difficult than most of the master sommeliers’—Lepeltier works at Rouge Tomate, a Michelin-starred, gourmet restaurant that focuses on delicious, healthy food. Set to reopen in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, it’s an establishment where you’d wear your best dress or suit—one with a lengthy tasting menu and highbrow food that tends to touch vegetables with a light hand. That light-handedness with vegetables is what complicates Lepeltier’s job as a sommelier. “When there’s less fat, less sugar, less salt, suddenly you’re left with a loss of those flavors. You’re left with almost naked ingredients,” she explains.
Sommeliers have their own philosophy when it comes to pairing food. For Lepeltier, it’s all about structure. “I decide my pairings on structure before aromatics,” she says. “The structure of the wine includes the alcohol level, acidity, tannin, sweetness, and gas. Those are the five things to think about for a pairing.” She also believes that there are ways to pair wine: first, to enhance the food; second, to enhance the wine; and third, to enhance both. “It’s that last one that’s very difficult.” And dessert, Lepeltier says, is one of the trickiest things to pair because of one thing: high sugar content. “If you can find a wine with very high residual sugar, as well as high acidity, it will be more balanced.”
Cherry pit, rooibos tea, and licorice are some of the flavor notes Pascaline detects when pairing chocolate with wine.
Dark chocolate is a favorite of hers, however. “If you want to get the aromatics of the extra dark chocolate, there’s almost no fat and no sweetness. You need to wait to get the aromatics, to let it melt for a certain amount of time,” she says. “Then you get a very interesting tannin.” She describes Lindt EXCELLENCE 85% Cocoa as subtle and layered and decides to pair it with a sweet wine—suggesting it would need a good amount of tannin to mimic the chocolate’s structure. “I’d pair the chocolate with a Banyuls Rimage, a fortified Grenache that’s very shortly aged in stainless steel.” Lepeltier says that this pairing would bring out the cherry pit, rooibos tea, and licorice-style tannin out of the chocolate.
For a pairing where the chocolate would enhance the wine, Lepeltier chooses an Umbrian wine: An ’08 Sagrantino di Montefalco Passito. “If you like something less fruit-forward, I would do a wine with a bit of a longer aging time but still a lot of tannin.” This particular grape variety is extremely rich in sugar and tannin—and made even moreso when the winemaker dries the grapes before making the wine—and is also slightly oxidized. Because of these components, the wine doesn’t seem as sweet as its sugar content might suggest. The result? “You get dried rose petals in the wine,” says Lepeltier.
The best pairing for enhancing both chocolate and wine? An aged Madeira. The wine, Lepeltier explains, has enough acidity to cut through the rich chocolate and bring out a bit of its fresher flavors, too: “The wine will bring out orange blossom, lime zest, grapefruit and a bit of nuttiness in the chocolate.”
Fresh flavors like orange blossom, lime, and grapefruit comes through when Pascaline pairs an aged Madeira with dark chocolate.
It’s pretty easy to see that Lepeltier is spot on with these pairings. But her rules aren’t hard and fast, even for her customers. “There is no bad pairing. Just drink!” She just wants people to experiment and have fun with their pairings. “At the end, I just want people to be happy.”