The Best Wine with Chocolate Chip Cookies…

Karen, what’s the best wine with chocolate chip cookies?

This is my kind of question.  Cookies are my favorite dessert and I serve them all the time--even after an elegant dinner party.  Chocolate chip cookies are harder to pair well with wine than one might think.  That’s because chocolate itself is a very profound flavor that’s highly complex, bitter, spicy and sweet all at the same time.  Nonetheless, one wine is indeed absolutely perfect with chocolate chip cookies: malmsey Madeira.  You just have to taste the rich vanilla, brown sugar, tawny, nuttiness of a great malmsey Madeira next to a chocolate chip cookie to be converted for life.  Malmsey, by the way, is the sweetest style of Madeira and it is the one you should buy.  The dry styles of Madeira won’t work as well.  I usually serve Blandy’s 10 Year Old Malmsey Madeira, and when I bake the chocolate chip cookies I put walnuts in them too to make the match even more outrageous.

— Karen

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