Luca Malbec 2007.  It’s Argentina in a bottle.  The wine is huge, almost black, and over the top in terms of fruit extraction, oak, and alcohol (14.5%).  The bottle itself weighs twice as much as wimpy French wine bottles.

Its perfectly agreeable wine but it has no complexity.  It smells like you just walked into a tool shed and found a blueberry pie cooling on the shelf.  And it is clearly built to stand up to those fat steaks Argies are so fond of.  So as a vegetarian I have almost no use for this wine except for one thing.  I am usually the only wine drinker in the house, so I drink a bottle over the course of a few days.  This wine is so huge that it tastes exactly the same three days later as it did when I opened the bottle.

Now I have discovered a second thing.  It makes a perfect pairing with dark Belgian chocolate.  The chocolate masks some of the oak and dark fruit flavors and allows the slight acidity and strawberry flavors to come out and those perfectly complement the chocolate. These aspects are typical Argentinian Malbec so I would bet this pairing would work with any you can get your hands on.

I found this out because my daughters came home from a birthday party bringing a box of Belgian dark chocolate.  The birthday girl’s father is a friend of ours who is Belgian, so that explains the chocolate.  Now, his wife is from Argentina, and her father is a winemaker and yes, his best wine is a Malbec.  So the pairing works on many levels.