Early on in my wine making exploration, inspired by chocolate wines I had tasted before, I became fascinated by the idea of infusing my fruit wines with chocolate. Chocolate wine is an amazing and unique treat, but before you start thinking about adding chocolate sauce to your next bottle of red to create this delicacy, please just don’t because I can tell you from experience that won’t end well! Ultimately though I was able to develop an approach that used 80% or higher cacao dark chocolate as the flavor source and basically allowing wine to contact the chocolate for at least a month to fully integrate the chocolate flavor into the wine, an approach has produced a number of award-winning wines over the years.
Recently as I have been exploring ways of using our wines in making different foods, I thought that flipping the script and incorporating fruit wines into chocolates instead of putting chocolate flavors into our wines would be a fun approach to try. After spending a couple of evenings researching chocolate making, I decided to focus on making chocolate ganache incorporating our Rochoso wines since that seemed like a (relatively) simple and straight forward process.
Port-infused ganache recipes I read all had one thing in common: the basic path to making ganache is to dissolve chocolate in near-boiling heavy cream (aka heavy whipping cream) followed by adding a small amount of port to introduce the added flavor. Some recipes called for the addition of butter, vanilla, or other components as well, but I decided to keep it simple and let the flavor of our wines be the focus of the ganache. There were many variations regarding the relative amounts of these components to use and in my own trials, the ratios between port wine, chocolate, and cream needed to be varied based on the chocolate source to get a ganache of the right constituency and flavor. In the end, here are the recipes I developed:
White Chocolate Ganache: 3 oz White Chocolate chips, ¼ cup heavy cream, and 1 tablespoon of Rochoso wine.
Milk Chocolate Ganache: 2 oz Milk Chocolate chips, ¼ cup heavy cream, and 1 ½ tablespoons of Rochoso wine.
Dark Chocolate Ganache: 1.5 oz of 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate chips, ¼ cup heavy cream, 2 tablespoons of Rochoso wine.
In all cases, the cream was slowly heated on a stove top to just below the boiling point, stirring continuously to avoid a skim forming or clumping. The cream was then poured over the chocolate chips and the mixture was stirred until the chocolate was completely dissolved. In some cases, I had to microwave the mixture (no more than 10 seconds at a time) to get the chocolate to completely dissolve. Rochoso wines where then added and the ganache stirred until the wine was completely incorporated. Store the ganache in a refrigerator until it fully sets, which usually took a couple of hours, and then use. In all cases, this approach results in a very thick but pliable consistency that has a clear and obvious flavor of the added wine and can be used for a variety of baking and chocolate making purposes.
