Rather, salty, hard cheeses find their match with high tannin wines like cabernet sauvignon or nebbiolo. Pairing a firm cheese like Parmesan Reggiano with Champagne may create some dissonance, rather than an attractive union. The striking acid chops its way through the fatty, oily textures of the cheese creating balance, which is the ultimate goal in food and wine pairing. Wines with pronounced acid such as Champagne, dry riesling or any other cold-climate wine are a natural fit with fresh cheeses-much like how lemon juice and sugar form stability in lemonade. This is a natural defense mechanism that your body produces to get your mouth’s pH level back to normal and protect your tooth enamel. Let’s take acid and fat as an example: Wine’s naturally occurring acids are felt on the back of your tongue, resulting in salivation. The walls of those building blocks consist of a handful of pairings: what grows together goes together, intense with intense, acid with fat, sugar with spice.

Salt, sugar, acid, tannin, fat, and spice are the building blocks of a well-suited marriage of wine and cheese. The more you use and understand them the stronger the muscle gets. Your sense of taste and smell develop together like your muscles and joints at the gym. The point of any food pairing is to create a pleasurable experience. To get the most out of pairing wine and cheese, it’s best to understand the complexities of the two, and how they work with your senses of taste and smell. Human senses, especially smell and taste, are intrinsically linked and respond to both euphoria and discord. As cheese and wine age, they develop from either from the outside in, or the inside out (more on that below), and transform from soft and fruity to firm and complex.

On the wine side, there are a myriad of grapes winemakers can use, from the widely planted chardonnay to off-the-beaten-path varietals like xinomavro. These two agricultural products create a compatible union, with similarities and differences that serve to heighten the other’s performance.Ĭheese is made from almost any type of animal milk, or plant-based derivative, with cow, goat, and sheep being the most common examples. How to deliciously match the right wine with the right cheese, in time to make those holiday spreadsįrank Sinatra once sang of love and marriage and that “you can’t have one without the other.” The same can be said about wine and cheese, the classic culinary combination.

Fat cat chardonnay review