If you are looking for a special cheese course to serve for your sweetheart on the Valentine’s Day, look no further. We found a perfect cheese for the occasion – a “chocolate” cheese.
The name of this gem is Cocoa Cardona and it comes from Carr Valley in Wisconsin. It is made from 100% goat milk, aged, and dusted in cocoa powder with a slight hint of black pepper. It is very unique because it differs from most familiar goat cheeses which are typically soft and crumbly. By contrast, Cocoa Cardona’s texture is quite firm and uniform throughout. It is actually a semi-soft cheese, one of only a few goat cheeses in this category. We found Cocoa Cardona to be a mild cheese with a creamy delicate taste, a wonderful hint of bitter chocolate, and soft essence of pepper. The award winning cheese has won 1st Best-in-Class in the 2003 U.S. Cheese Contest as well as 1st Place in the 2007 American Cheese Society Awards for Goat’s Milk Cheeses. It is amazingly delicious.
Cocoa Cardona paired beautifully with a very special Pearl Ice Wine from the Inniskillin winery in Canada’s Niagara region. Made from Vidal grapes, left on the vine to ripen before the deep freeze of Canadian winter, the concentrated sugars and acids from the late-picked harvest yield an intense and aromatic desert wine with an amazing depth of flavors. The winemaker writes of Pearl:
The nobility of this vintage shines with an alluring assortment of fresh nectarine, papaya, litchi, tangerine and orange blossoms. These exquisite fruit flavors, combined with invigorating acidity, offer multi-layers of balanced pleasure.
Pearl is indeed a complex ice wine and wonderfully satisfying. The nectar’s sweetness is balanced with subtle fruit flavors which melded nicely with the soft cocoa and pepper in Cocoa Cardona. In combination, the taste was extremely pleasing, soft and creamy, lightly refreshing and aromatic, with restrained sweetness. This was a perfect pairing of wine and cheese that is highly recommended!
