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Food and Wine articles for women over 40 Food and Wine articles from TimeFinders Coaching

50 Ways to Keep Your Lover this Valentine’s Day

by Natalie MacLean

50 Ways to Keep Your Lover this Valentine’s Day"Want to seduce someone this Valentine’s Day?" asks Natalie MacLean, author of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass. "Just share a glass of wine (or three) with your sweetheart."

"Wine is liquid sensuality: Its heady bouquet stimulates the appetite and its velvet caress soothes that desire," she observes. "What other drink is described as both ‘voluptuous’ and ‘muscular’? And when you pair wine with the mouth-coating luxury of chocolate, the combination is impossible to resist."

The creamy flavors of chocolate go best with sweet, full-bodied, high-alcohol wines, MacLean notes. She suggests wines to complement 50 chocolate dishes in her online matching tool at www.nataliemaclean.com/matcher. Just click on "desserts" to find pairings for chocolate mud pie to chocolate cheesecake.

Natalie’s top 10 wine and chocolate matches:

  1. Dark Chocolate and Banyuls, France
  2. Chocolate-Covered Biscotti and Recioto Della Valpolicella, Italy
  3. Chocolate-Orange Cake and Liqueur Muscat, Australia
  4. Chocolate with Nuts and Tawny Port, Portugal
  5. Milk Chocolate and Tokaji, Hungary
  6. Bittersweet Chocolate and Amarone, Italy
  7. Chocolate-Dipped Fruit and Icewine, Canada
  8. Chocolate Ganache Truffles and Sauternes, France
  9. Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake and Framboise, California
  10. Chocolate Hearts with Cream Filling and Cream Sherry, Spain

Natalie’s online food-and-wine matcher doesn’t just focus on chocolate. The interactive tool has thousands of wines to pair with any dish: meat, pasta, seafood, vegetarian fare, pizza, eggs, cheese and dessert. You simply choose the food or wine from a drop-down menu to get the pairing suggestions. There are also lots of recipes for those planning a romantic meal. The matcher is updated regularly with new dishes and wines from the 83,000-plus readers who subscribe to Natalie’s free e-newsletter, which offers tips on how to buy, cellar and serve wine.

In Red, White and Drunk All Over, Natalie discusses how to match food and wine in greater depth, including wines for a multi-course dinner. There’s also a chapter with advice on pairing wine with five challenging foods: chocolate, cheese, spicy dishes, vegetables and fast food. Got a dish or a wine to stump Natalie? Just e-mail her via her web site and she’ll suggest a match for you.

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NEWSLETTER
Natalie MacLean from Nat Decants

Reprinted from Nat Decants

Natalie MacLean has won four James Beard Journalism Awards, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award; and she was named the World's Best Drink Writer at the World Food Media Awards. Rex Pickett, author of Sideways, says that Natalie "writes about wine with a sensuous obsession" and is "often laugh-out-loud funny." Eric Asimov of The New York Times notes, "Ms. MacLean is the disarming Everywoman - she loves wine, loves drinking - a winning formula." The Financial Times observes: "Natalie MacLean is a new force in the wine writing world-a feisty North American answer to Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson."

Natalie's book Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass chronicles her last three years sipping, spitting and slogging her way through the international wine world to visit some its most evocative places and to meet some of its most charismatic, obsessive and innovative characters. The book has been described as A Year in Provence meets Kitchen Confidential then goes Sideways.

Red, White and Drunk All Over was recently chosen the Best Wine Literature Book in the English language at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. The competition receives more than 6,000 books from 60 countries each year. The awards were created at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany ten years ago to reward those who "cook and drink with words." The book was also nominated for the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards.

At the World Food Media Awards in Australia, Natalie was named the World's Best Drink Writer. The competition received more than 1,000 entries. An international and independent panel of 47 food and wine experts selected her from a short-list of 14 nominees from the U.S., Canada, U.K., New Zealand and Australia.

Read more about Natalie MacLean on her website!

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