I love this time of year when stone fruit starts coming to market on West Coast.
How many times have you seen tasting notes that mention “dark cherry”?
How many times have you actually eaten dark cherries with wine? Uh, never. Well, cherry sauce with duck and Burgundy … yum … but not the raw fruit.
Well tonight I gobbled firm, ripe dark cherries after dinner with a 2022 Rafanelli Zinfandel.
In a word … killer! 
I doubt people often have plums, cassis, currants, strawberries, or blackberries with wine either, much less leather, wet leaves, tobacco, cedar, or graphite 
Btw, as a Burg nut I’ve written before here about my affinity for well-made high-toned, less extracted Zin.
If Scherrer is the Chambolle of Zin then Raffanelli is the Morey St Denis.
Both highly recommended.
Or cat pee, fecal matter, barnyard… 
I just made a cherry clafoutis with fresh sour cherries (also made jam). I ate that with a 2019 Martin Mullen Auslese. Delicious!
I love eating fresh cherries with Pinot. And this time of year we’re just about at the peak!
I’m a stone fruit with wine fan. Cherries, plums… I often prefer this pairing to cheeses. In my opinion, arbitrary cheese pairing with wine can be worse than leather!
Never tried this but was intrigued enough by your comment to give it a try. You’re right that now is the time to get fresh cherries at their best— so let’s do this. But the question remained; Old or New World Pinot? I ultimately went New World, worried that a mouthful of Burgundy immediately after sweet fresh cherries would just taste like dirt and poop.
Ended up going with Six Cloves by WBer @Sonoe_Hirabayashi. A very interesting pairing!!! So different than pairing wine with a savory dinner course. (I rarely drink wine with sweets, so this was a new experience for me.) The sweetness of the cherries overshadowed any sort of sweet flavors of the wine, leaving a much more savory, almost saline, impression that I’ve never quite gotten from Pinot. I think I prefer Pinot with usual dinner fare, but would certainly give this a try again.
I just want some dark, red cherries now. Not a fan of plums, though.
Thank you @Noah_C for picking up a bottle of Six Cloves to try with cherries 
I love that you gave this pairing a shot! Your choice to go with a Russian River Pinot makes total sense, especially since this AVA’s Pinots are often described with notes like red cherry, dark cherry, cherry cola… it’s basically all about cherries!
A wine with a touch of residual sugar and no whole cluster and no new oak may have worked better. I haven’t had the Rafanelli Zinfandel that @Matthew_King paired in a long time, but I imagine it has a little RS, which probably helped with the sweetness of the fruits and acid.
Cheers and happy July 4th! Hope to see you at VinDependence Days next week!
If the cherries are sweet it may be better to pair with a sweeter fortified wine like Port or a dessert red wine. I actually like dark chocolate with big red wines.
This. Never understood why some people want to pair fruits with dry wines, because almost all fruits are sweet enough to kill all the fruit from a dry wine. Furthermore, most fruits are high enough in acidity that the acidity in wine won’t taste in comparison, making the wine feel flat.
Sure, you can get interesting new flavor combinations that might make the fruit taste in a completely different way. However, you won’t get much flavors for the wine, so pairing a great wine with fruit is just doing a great disservice to the wine - unless you really want to taste all the non-fruit flavors residing in the wine. For example many fruits will accentuate any bitter, earthy or farmyardy flavors!
This wasn’t my experience. Didn’t give any of this too much thought. I just enjoyed the experience of eating perfect dark cherries and taking a few sips of well made Zinfandel. Not going to put this in my regular routine … just a summertime goof.
