If you’re a fan of the wine and cheese combo and you want to make sure you get it right this Christmas you’re in luck, as this week the Ideal Wine Company reveals five rules for pairing wine with cheese.
Blow Your Taste Buds Away
As a provider of luxury wines at reasonable prices, the Ideal Wine Company understands the attraction of pairing your favourite luxury tipples with a block of cheese.
The flavours complement each other astoundingly, making for an experience destined to blow your taste buds away. Nevertheless, you have to be careful when you pair wine with cheese. Both come in so many different varieties that if you make a mis-step, the flavours tend to contrast so sharply your sense of taste won’t recover for days.
Get the Pairing Right With the Following Five Rules
It’s perfectly possible to pair wine with cheese and get it right. Just use the following five rules for pairing wine and cheese from the Ideal Wine Company…
1) Pair by Age: As cheese ages, just like wine, it’s flavour evolves. That’s why it’s always a good idea to pair by age. Match young wines to young cheese, and older wines to older cheeses. New wines have a rich fruity flavour that compliments the high water content in a young cheese, whilst older wines have the complexity and body needed to make an aged cheese shine!
2) Contrast Salty and Sweet: As cheese ages, it begins to develop a saltier taste. If you want to balance out the saltiness of an older cheese, pair it with a sweeter wine. In contrast, a younger cheese often works better with a drier wine.
3) Think of Tannins: As a cheese ages,its moisture slowly evaporates leaving protein and fat behind. That’s why red wine often serve as the perfect complement to an older cheese. The tannins in red wine bind to the protein and fat, cleansing your palate after every taste. Yet this process can make younger cheeses taste chalky and metallic due to the lack of available fat for the tannins to bind to.
4) Watch the Texture: Have you ever wondered why Camembert and Champagne make a great combination? It’s because the bubbles in a glass of champagne act as a counterpoint to the richness of the Camembert, wiping your tongue clean so you crave another bite. That’s why you should always look up how the texture of a wine may work with the texture of a cheese before you decide on a pairing.
5) Pair by Region: It doesn’t always work, but sometimes you can stumble on a perfect match simply by pairing a wine and cheese by the region from which they originate. Red Burgundies, for example, taste fantastic with a block of Époisses (a Burgundy Cheese) and a Loire Sancerre often goes down a storm when you pair it with a slice of classic Loire goat’s cheese.
Wow Your Dinner Party Guests
Please remember that this is not an exact science. If you want to learn how to pair wine with cheese, do the research. Soon enough, you’ll learn so much you’ll be able to wow the guests at any dinner with your amazing ability to pair wine and cheese!
