by Larry Paterson, April 11, 2006
A few of the things that could make nice chocolate-flavoured fruit wines:
Tasting Notes for Commercial Wines How I got started
I will try to update this page as time goes by, but you know that a retired civil servant isn't to be relied upon... [updated Aug 18 2007] lfw
Applewood Cherry/Chocolate Winery is near Stouffville.
Archibald Cherries 'n' Chocolate Winery is near Bowmanville.
Crown Bench Ambrosia (Icewine with chocolate) Winery is near Beamsville.
Kawartha Country Raspberry & Chocolate Winery is near Buckhorn, north of Peterborough.
Kawartha Country Strawberry & Chocolate Winery is near Buckhorn, north of Peterborough.
Rush Creek Decadence (Strawberry Chocolate) Winery is near Aylmer
Scotch Block Blueberry Truffle Winery is near Milton.
Scotch Block Raspberry Truffle Winery is near Milton.
Sunnybrook Chocolate Embrace (Blueberry Chocolate) Winery is near Niagara-on-the-Lake
The word I hear from all producers is that these wines are doing well indeed! Lord knows that these small wineries need all the help that they can get...
I started making wine in late 1995, and by 1997 was messing around with all kinds of fruit wines. After making raspberry wine, I decided to do a number of 2-litre experiments by macerating various items in the finished (sweetened) wine. These included ginger, nutmeg and cloves in one, almond slivers in another, vanilla beans (yes 2!) in another, mint in another and hunks of dark chocolate in yet another. While all were interesting, only the chocolate flavoured raspberry was really appealing. I did this for personal consumption from time to time for the next few years.
Sometime later I started hearing about a small winery in Niagara that was flavouring icewine with chocolate, but didn't go looking. I should have, as Peter Kocsis at Crown Bench Winery is making all kinds of neat flavoured icewine products (see tasting notes for these).
In 2004 I decided to use a small French oak barrel (20 litres) to ferment red raspberries. When this was done, I got the urge to screw around again with chocolate. First step was to risk my life trying to melt chocolate chipits (from the grocery store) in my wife's egg poacher on the stove. While the pot cleaned up, and the resulting flavour was really nice in the two litres of wine, the fat in the chipits made it impractical to do more this way (after filtering there was less than a litre of wine, one horribly messed up Buon Vino minijet filter, and seriously clogged pads). Strike one!
The next effort was to mix some of the raspberry dessert wine (no water added to this one!) with an addition of about 8% Monin Chocolate Syrup and found that it made it taste just about like a Cherry Blossom (added a cherry/almond flavour not listed on the bottle, but certainly present). This worked well, but was prohibitively expensive, as 300ml of the syrup approaches $10 Canadian. Strike two! Wines with and without this were poured for 50-odd serious winos at a Bordeaux vs Ontario tasting at Brock University in February 2005, and were, I thought, quite well received.
Next step was to make a trip to Worlds Finest Chocolate factory in Campbellford, to investigate whether using the byproducts of Chocolate manufacturing would make a suitable additive. The good people there gave me two kilos of chocolate powder (ground cocoa mass) which I tried adding to finished wine. The powder was relatively insoluble, and did not give the full flavouring effect I'd hoped for, and had minor filtration problems. Next step was to ferment more raspberry wine, this time adding the powder at the onset of fermentation. The flavour results were all that I could ask for, but again solubility and filtration problems existed, albeit less so due to the ongoing mixing effect of fermentation.
After this, Rebecca Goertz, the winemaker at Sunnybrook Farm Estate Winery devised a liquid chocolate extract that was not sweet, was powerful, stirred into the wine immediately and left a great flavour. Other wineries have found other ways to add the chocolate flavours to their own wines, but I will use the Sunnybrook method until I run out! This is not available to amateur winemakers. I have limited access for personal use and educational purposes (and pay for it).
If you want some amateur advice on how to make your own chocolate flavoured fruit wines, please contact me by email
