Tuesday, December 11 2007
The Worst of All Possible Worlds
Looks like heaven, tastes yucky
In this year's Limited Edition presentations I startled a number of people by stating that I generally hate wine and cheese as a food pairing. Cheese is generally salty, often with an earthy character, sometimes a hint of ammonia, and so much butterfat that it gets entangled in the tannins in red wine, rendering them harsher rather than mellower. Even whites, unless they have a darn good bracing of acidity wind up getting their punts handed to them by a decent cheese.
By far the worst culprit is cheddar. Nothing goes with 90% of the North American Cheddar I've tasted, and even the good, crumbly English (and to a lesser extent, Irish) Cheddars don't enhance red wines and only play in the most desultory sense with a brilliantly good white--and it's not usually an enhancement for either of them.
This is not a popular stance. Everyone seems fixated and rapt on the idea of wine and cheese, as though it were a culinary commandment handed down from the Heavens by Brillat-Savarin or Escoffier. Heck, there's even a Wine and Cheese show held in Toronto, and searching the inter-webs for wine and cheese yields a half a million entries! There are wine and cheese bars, wine and cheese societies, and wine and cheese cookbooks!
Who are your to believe then: everyone else in the world who adores wine and cheese, or me, who only pairs about a half dozen cheeses with even fewer wines, out of the thousands of styles of each that are available.
Well, me, of course. But it turns out I'm not standing quite as alone as I thought. It turns out that NY Times Dining section writer Florence Fabricant isn't much of a wine 'n' cheese lover either. To be fair, she mainly grouses (in a NYT just-being-informative kind of way) about red wine and cheese, advocating white instead. But she does raise some great points, quoting a UC Davis study:
Experiments with panels of trained volunteers involving eight red wines and eight cheeses over two months of sensory analyses showed that "contrary to common perception, the cheese and wine pairing translates into wine character suppression more than enhancement."Her contention is that the acidity of white wine handles the fat of cheeses better than the tannin of red does. I'll buy that, but not all the way. Unless the white in question is ready to prod buttock and take names, it's going to get buried by any cheese with character. One exception I generally make are for crisp, fruity whites with a great nose and perhaps a wee bit of residual sugar (like our Limited Edition Pacific Quartet) with Chevre (goat cheese) or surface-ripened cheeses like Brie and Camembert (please! Don't melt it in the oven. This is a crime beyond measure. Drink warm Cheez-Wiz instead, if you must, but serve soft cheeses like this at room temperature).
The other exception I make is for Italian reds and good hard cheese. As a rule of thumb, an Italian red is going to have more acidity and sterner tannins than reds from other countries (exceptions to every rule, I know: Dolcetto is as soft as goosedown and fruity as a Hostess pie, but still delicious). Our Limited Edition Brunello is a great example: bright cherry fruit clamped down alongside some darker red fruit character, mouth-gripping tannins and very real acidity mean that paired with Parmigiano Reggiano it can stand up brilliantly to the high fat, almost caramel-like nuttiness of the cheese, enhancing both. A softer, fruitier wine, like our Carmenere-Cabernet from Chile would be completely lost with that pairing, tasting like fruit juice and grapes.
If you really want to experience the ultimate in cheese and beverage pairing, you need to start drinking beer, and the Belgium-ier the better. Canadian beer writer (and darned nice chap) Stephen Beaumont has a beer cuisine section on his World of Beer site, with some great ideas--I especially like the thought of Roquefort cheese with Belgian Witbier (a cloudy wheat beer spiced with coriander and orange-peel). Sounds pretty nummy to me.
And Cheddar? Try it with an English Ale--Bass for milder cheddar, and a cracking good IPA style for the more robust cheeses--you won't be sorry to put down the red wine, for once!
| Posted by Tim AT 8:39PM | 1 Comment |  |
Post A Comment |  |
 |
Comments
Alex MacDougall
Posted 2 years ago
I would have to suppose that any discussion of what wines and foods pair, in the end boils down to individual taste preferences of the "tasters." Afterall all, we have have those who like Viognier but not care at all for Charnonnay, and certainly vice versa.>I have particiapted in many cheese and wine tastings where regardless of the wines, I would not have eaten the cheese by one own choice. Sometimes it was a success and sometimes a failure. In the end, because we have been programed to like wine with cheese (and perhaps some fresh French bread), we think it is proper regardless of these college students experiemnt -- perhaps it was the same tasting fatigue that makes the 50th wine in a tasting seem to good or bad. I am glad to have discovered you.