Perfect Pairings in Wine and Cheese

What’s a wine writer doing, writing about cheese? Talk about perfect pairings…I had a great educational session over-the-counter at the Cowgirl Creamery store in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Cheesemonger Adam Smith patiently looked at my list (Marsanne, Pinot, Red Blend, Malbec, Syrah) and painstakingly gave me tastes and explanations until we found perfect pairings. Here they are…

Montagne du Jura cheese comes from the Jura Mountains, the same region as does Gruyere cheese. This is a full bodied cheese, with a nutty flavor. The high fat content helps to mellow the mouthfeel of high tannins in wine such as Syrah.

The Coolea cheese is hand made from pasteurized cows milk, imported from the mountain farm of Dick and Sinead Willems in Coolea, County Cork, Ireland.. The cheese has flavors which are carmelly and toffee-like, and a lovely richness. It will pair magnificently with a Red Blend wine and also with a Malbec.

The Humboldt Fog cheese, a ripened goat’s milk cheese made by Cypress Grove Cheve in Arcata, California, is an elegant, soft, surface ripened cheese. The texture is creamy and luscious with a subtle tangy flavor. Each handcrafted wheel features a ribbon of edible vegetable ash along its center and a coating of ash under its exterior to give it a distinctive, cake-like appearance. It will pair perfectly with Marsanne.

Marsanne also pairs well with California Crottin, made in Sebastopol by Redwood Hill Creamery. This enterprise started as a farmstead, and was a pioneer in goats milk cheeses. This artisan cheese is made in the traditional French-style . It has a wrinkly, geotrichum candidum rind, a fluffy texture and robust, earthy flavor.

The Appalachian cheese from Meadow Creek in Galax, Virginia, has a supple straw color paste and a white mould rind with glimpses of pink showing through. The flavor is mild and buttery with a spicy finish and just a hint of mushroom. Meadowcreek Dairy, perched in the misty, cool emerald reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, operates a seasonal Jersey dairy at an elevation of 2,800 feet where the water is pure, the air is bright and clean, and the soils are rich and untainted. A great pairing with Pinot.

Another great Pinot pairing is Vermont Ayr, produced by the Crawford Family Farm in 1 and 4 pound wheels using French cheese vats and slow aging. The edible rind gives an earthy contrast to the creamy sweetness of the interior of the cheese. This cheese is named for the Ayrshire cows from which the milk comes. I enjoyed the information from the website, which talks about “terroir”, a term that’s usually reserved for discussions about wine: “We succeed in revealing the complex flavors of our “terroir”—the land that the animals graze. “

By the way, if you want to do your own wine-cheese pairing party at home, cut fresh baguettes into ½ inch pieces, and purchase quince paste as a tasty spread under the cheese. Make the pairing special by adding marcona almonds! You can use regular almonds of course, but marcona almonds are worth the extra price. Marcona almonds solo are a perfect pairing with sherry, too.

You can find Cowgirl Creamery cheeses at good local wine bars in the Tahoe area, such as Uncorked in Squaw Valley and Tahoe City. Cowgirl Creamery has several retail stores: Pt. Reyes and San Francisco, CA, and Washington DC. You can visit the Cowgirl Creamery cheesemaking facility in Pt. Reyes, and a second creamery in Petaluma, California opened in 2008, where you can take a tour. Or, order on the internet at http://www.cowgirlcreamery.com/, where they offer both individual cheeses as well as a selection as Party-in-a-Box.

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© 2011 Barbara Keck

For more information on dining and the wide range of activities around Lake Tahoe, see the online version of The Tahoe Weekly. This article appeared in my column "It's Grape" in February 2011.

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How To Use Your iPhone to Enhance Your Wine Knowledge: GUEST BLOG

How To Use Your iPhone to Enhance Your Wine Knowledge

Drinking wine and using your mobile phone is rarely a good idea. You might dial an ex-girlfriend and mouth off about why you left her, or drunkenly roam the internet for hours searching for that elusive answer to the debate that you and your friend have been squabbling over and end up with a huge bill at the end of the month. However, with the development of the iPhone, there are now iPhone apps that can help you enhance your knowledge of wine and enjoy the experience of tasting your favourite tipple.

For example, Pocket Wine, ($3.99) is a fantastic new app that encourages you to expand your knowledge of the wine world, whilst simultaneously matching your tastes to specific wines. By listing all of the main Table Wine grape varieties of grapes and blends, Pocket Wine offers you a clear understanding of these wines, allowing you the opportunity to learn a great amount about the world of wine at a fraction of the price of a sommelier course or ten years of drinking in wine bars. The good thing about this app is that it never pushes any wine on you or tries to sell you individual bottles, but rather it matches potential wines to your palate through a series of questions aimed at identifying your preferred tastes in the My Taste section. It also matches and pairs different foods to particular wines and grape varieties, meaning that you will never again have a meal that doesn’t match your wine.

The Wine Enthusiast Guide, ($4.99) is based on the popular wine magazine of the same name, and lists thousands of professional reviews of individual bottles, constantly updated by a panel of experts. As well as being able to search for every wine regarding to grape variety or blend, style, price, variety and region, you can also enjoy the twenty illustrated tutorials that guide you through the art of unlocking the secrets of wine. If you like the lesson, you can follow links to hundreds of pages of web content that will help further your wine knowledge. You’ll never be embarrassed by a snooty waiter in a restaurant ever again!

Now, anybody who has been a tourist or a long-term visitor in the wonderful world of wine is bound to have come across a wine snob. These guys can be pretty unpleasant at the best of times, let alone when they’ve had one too many and they are bubbling with arrogance and disdainful sniffs. However, the iPhone app that shares the same name as these haughty characters provides you with enough ammunition to challenge them when they try to disparage your best efforts in wine-based conversation. Wine Snob, ($1.99) is a particularly sophisticated iPhone app that allows you to track and rate each wine that you try, whilst searching for recommendations, definitions and food pairings. The descriptions of the wines are the apps strong point, separating it from other apps of the same ilk; sometimes its like reading a wine-based novel, giving plenty of vernacular to impress and defeat you snobby opponent.

There are plenty of apps out there for you to collect and select, but these three are an excellent starting point. Above all, the most important thing is that you enjoy your wine, and take pleasure in recommending wines to others; if your iPhone can help you expand your knowledge of wine, then you should utilize this tool and treat your taste buds to the technological advances in the wine world. Now, who said that technology had to be boring?!

Guest author David Harfield blogs at iphoneappcafe.com about iPhone apps, accessories, and also provides tips to get the most out of your iPhone.