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Sommelier To Go: Pairing Wine with Cheese

Posted by Adam Kuban, January 31, 2007 at 7:15 AM

Available only on Serious Eats, our Sommelier To Go, Joshua Wesson, sits down with us and gives quick and easy tips for matching three kinds of wine with three kinds of cheese—a goats' milk, a sheep's milk, and a cow's milk.

OUR SOMMELIER SAYS
In general, when matching a wine with a cheese, you can go two routes: Either find one with similar flavors or one whose flavors contrast that of the cheese.

FEATURED WINES
Caves da Cerca Ouro Verde Vinho Verde
A light white wine from Portugal. It has a tanginess that goes well with the tanginess of the French Tomme de Cabrioulet goat's milk cheese seen in the video. This wine has a double blessing, Wesson says, in that it is low in alcohol and is a little effervescent. "It's the pefect foil for tangy goat's milk cheese."

Tortoise Creek 2005 Pinot Noir
Sheep's milk cheeses usually have an earthiness that needs to be addressed, so you need a wine with a little bit of earthiness to match. This wine from southern France has "a little bit of that mushroomy, earthy quality present in a lot of Old World pinot noirs," Wesson says.

De Bortoli Willowglen Tawny Port
The smoked blue cheese seen in the video needs a wine that's fairly assertive to handle the boldness of its blue veins. This Australian wine has some sweetness, "which is a beautiful thing," Wesson says. "Blue cheese plus sweet wine brings out a third set of flavors—that of butterscotch and toffee."

CHEESES SEEN IN THIS VIDEO
For more on these cheeses, watch our video in which Serious Eats's Ed Levine talks to master cheesemonger Steven Jenkins: Serious Eats Basics: Choosing Cheeses

Tomme de Cabrioulet
Comes from the Ariège region of France in the Pyrenees. Made from raw goat's milk. Has smooth flavor, ashed rind, very limited in the United States.

Torta del Casar
A Spanish countryside sheep's milk cheese that's not pasteurized. Our expert cheesemonger friend Steven Jenkins calls it his "cheese of the decade." From Extremadura, this "drop-dead" selection has notes of "chocolate, leather, tobacco, and dried fruit."

Smokey Blue
From Oregon's Rogue Creamery, this is a smoked blue cheese made from raw cow's milk and smoked with hazelnut shells. Though Jenkins was "underwhelmed to the max" by the thought of a smoked blue cheese ("I thought it would be too busy"), it was "the cheese that took Europe by storm in October 2006."

ABOUT JOSHUA WESSON
We like Joshua because he took wine and made it accessible to everyone. You can walk in to one of his Best Cellars stores with $20 and leave with a great bottle of wine and $5 in change—each bottle he and his colleagues scour the world to carefully select is $15 or less.

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