So I Guess Wine Cocoa Is a Thing Now

Okay, so it is definitely hot cocoa weather. We can all agree on that, right? Rainy. Damp. Gray. Not yet so cold that you need a good, stiff shot of whiskey just to walk down the street to the Redbox (and two more when you get home), but not exactly balmy either. It takes a good, miserable, soaking kind of cold to make doing something as ridiculous as drinking a coffee mug full of hot melted chocolate seem wise, and that’s what we have right now.

But the folks at Tria Taproom and Tria Cafe Fitler Square are currently offering a little something extra with their hot cocoa.

They’re making theirs with wine.

And okay, I haven’t tried the wine cocoa yet. They just started serving it a couple days ago and it’ll be on the menu until at least the end of January. But seriously, I can’t decide whether that sounds good or like the grossest thing ever.

The details are thus: The cocoa is house made from scratch. It’s “blended” with a bold malbec and served with tiny marshmallows. And basically, it’s hot cocoa made with red wine. For $8 a mug.

I am of two minds here. On the one hand, describing the taste of really good chocolate is often like describing the taste of wine. There are subtleties, notes of odd flavors. Some of the best I’ve ever had (some super-dark Russian Korkunov) actually tasted a bit like a very powerful, full-bodied, punch-in-the-mouth red, and I recall being surprised by how wine-like the flavor was. I can understand pairing chocolate with wine, certainly. I can imagine the comfort of warm wine and chocolate together. And, obviously, mini-marshmallows make everything better.

But on the other hand, I had a box of wine truffles once from Eclat and they were terrible. I can’t imagine how the liquid qualities (the texture, most notably) of wine would mix with the creaminess of a good hot cocoa. And also, there’s just something about the idea of drinking wine and melted chocolate together that sounds…wrong.

So have any of you out there tried this yet? They just started serving on January 2, so I know that’s unlikely, but still. Or have any of you out there ever made something like this yourselves? Let me know in the comments. Because otherwise, I might just have to take a fieldtrip and try it out for myself. And I’m just not sure I want to do that.

Tria [f8b8z]