Welcome to Cowes Fringe 2026! New for this year is an artisan chocolate and spirits tasting featuring delights from Chantal Coady OBE aka The Chocolate Detective with a range of delicious spirits. A HUGE thank you to Bar46 Cowes for hosting us and for the Jack Thompson team for their unfailing generosity and help with this event!
First, some chocolate and spirit pairing rules of thumb:
Match intensity first. The spirit and the chocolate need to be in the same weight category. A delicate single malt will be flattened by 85% dark chocolate and a heavily peated whisky will destroy milk chocolate, for example.
The sweetness rule. The spirit needs to meet or exceed the sweetness of the chocolate. Dry spirits tend to work better with darker, less sweet chocolate and aged, sweeter spirits open the door to milk and white chocolate.
Barrel-aged spirits are your friends. Aged spirits like whiskey, cognac and rum echo the natural vanilla and caramel richness you can pick out in fine chocolate. They’re speaking the same language.
Cocktails don’t work. It’s worth knowing that cocktails do not work with chocolate. The competing ingredients tend to muddy everything. Neat or lightly diluted spirits only.
Quality on both sides. Don’t cheap out! Quality, artisan chocolate and spirit bring out each other’s flavours, whereas cheaper versions drown everything in sweetness.
METHOD: Taste each alone first to understand their individual characters, then bring them together. Let the chocolate melt completely before you sip. Don’t bite and gulp simultaneously or you’ll miss the conversation happening between them!
White Chocolate X Gin
Jack Thompson ‘The Islander’ Artisan Gin, £48 Jack Thompson
White Chocolate with Fennel & Cardamom, £16.95 Jack Thompson
This is the pairing that makes you wonder whether the gin and the chocolate were made for each other, which in a sense they were. The Islander's bergamot lemon, jasmine and gentian find their mirror in the fennel and cardamom of the white chocolate. It’s botanical calling to botanical across the table. The creaminess softens the gin's edges and what you're left with is something that tastes unmistakably of the island.
Crystalised Ginger Chococlate X Spiced Rum
Bathtub Rumbullion Spiced Rum, £34.95 Master of Malt
The Chocolate Detective Dark Chocolate with Crystalised Ginger, £16.95 Jack Thompson
Rumbullion is Madagascan vanilla, orange peel, cinnamon and cloves It’s christmas in a bottle, and proud of it. Dark chocolate and crystallised ginger is its natural partner. The ginger amplifies the warming spice in the rum, the dark chocolate gives it somewhere to land, and the orange peel note running through the spirit ties everything together. Bold, generous and completely intuitive once it hits your palate.
Salted Caramel X Salted Caramel
Shimmer Salted Caramel Vodka, £39 Isle of Wight Distillery
The Chocolate Detective, Salted Caramel Seagull Eggs, £14.95 Jack Thompson
Unapologetically indulgent and entirely the point. Caramel meeting caramel, salt lifting salt… this is mirror pairing at its most direct. The lightness of the vodka base stops it tipping into excess and what remains is something that tends to make the room go quiet on the first sip. No apologies necessary.
Milk Chocolate X Bourbon Whiskey
Old Fitzgerald 7 Year Old Bourbon, £64 Majestic (from June)
The Chocolate Detective, Milk Chocolate, Blackthorn & Sea Salt, £16.95 Jack Thompson
Seven years in charred American oak gives this bourbon real depth, with vanilla, caramel and a little wood smoke wrapping around the milk chocolate like it was always meant to be there. The sea salt cuts through any sweetness and keeps things honest. But it's the blackthorn that makes this pairing interesting: that wild, hedgerow bitterness lifting everything just enough to stop it being comfortable.
Orange Chocolate X Cognac VSOP
Courvoisier VSOP Cognac, £47, Waitrose
The Chocolate Detective, Dark Chocolate Orangettes, £16.95 Jack Thompson
Some pairings exist because they simply work, every time, without exception. Cognac and dark chocolate orange is one of them. The dried fruit, oak and gentle spice of a good VSOP finds its natural home alongside candied orange peel wrapped in dark chocolate. We've ended here deliberately. This is a full stop worth savouring.
See more about booze and chocolate pairings!