Describing wine: Chocolate!

James,

Many of your tasting notes include reference to chocolate of various kinds. My understanding is that this is almost always a result of oak. Do you agree with that?

I confess I find the ubiquitous chocolate notes in Italian wines (in particular, but among others) to be boring; to me they seem to obfuscate the character of the varietal wine in the glass.

I think you can get chocolate without oak, particularly with Merlot. May be milk chocolate is more from oak, but I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.