Napoleon ewes cheese and mature white Saint Mont

It’s always a bit of thrill to come across a cheese you don’t know especially when you’re bowled over by it as in the case of the Napoleon ewes milk cheese I tasted at the Plaimont pop-up wine bar in Marciac, in south-west France last week. (It's the one at the top of the board in the picture above.)

According to the encycopaedic La Fromagerie, which stocks it occasionally, it’s a unique pasteurised cheese from the Hautes-Pyrenées “in the style of other Pyrénées ewe's milk tommes (such as Ossau) but with a softer texture and a lovely nutty tang.”

It was really sublime with Plaimont's 2015 Le Faite Blanc Saint Mont, made, like their other wines, from the relatively obscure grape varieties of Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Petit Courbu. It’s richly textured and savoury, slightly salty, even which works well with sheep cheese and handled the pungency of the Napoleon really well.

Corney & Barrow has the 2014 vintage for £20.95 a bottle but you could enjoy the same experience with an older vintage of the more modestly priced Les Vignes Retrouvées, the 2017 vintage of which is available from The Wine Society for £8.95 (though ideally I’d hang on to it for at least a couple of years to enjoy it with cheese,)

I visited Marciac as a guest of Plaimont.

Wigmore cheese and 13 year old Pouilly Fumé

It’s still not widely recognised that white wines have the capacity to age, particularly wines that are noted for their freshness and bright acidity so it was fascinating to try a range of older wines from the Centre-Loire yesterday with a range of different cheeses.

The combination which stood out for me was a 2003 Pouilly Fumé Prestige from Domaine du Bouchot* which had developed a lush, tropical, passionfruit character you’d have more readily associated with a New Zealand sauvignon blanc - astonishing for a wine of this age (13 years old).

The cheese I thought it worked best with it was not a goats cheese a well matured Wigmore, a Camembert-style sheeps cheese. It was served with a drizzle of honey which picked up on the ripeness of the wine. (2003 if you remember was a very warm vintage)

Goats cheese would have been the more usual pairing with wines from this region so it was interesting to discover that a sheep cheese worked well too. Conversely one of the specialist cheese sites cheese.com says that Wigmore goes well with Cabernet Merlot. I’m not sure that would be my first port of call (if I wanted a red I’d probably go for a pinot noir) but would be interesting to try it out.

* You can buy a 2015 Domaine du Bouchot Pouilly Fumé from Ocado for £13.49 instead of £17.99 until midnight tomorrow GMT. Not the same cuvée but might be worth a whirl.

I was hosting the event at Bell's Diner in Bristol for Les Vins du Centre Loire.