Petit Munster and Gewürztraminer

Sometimes Match of the Week is not so much about an undiscovered pairing but one that’s executed in a particularly inventive way. Which was absolutely the case at a dinner at Monica Galetti’s restaurant Mere last week with the famous Alsace producer Famille Hugel.

She paired a cheese course of Petit Munster, a washed rind cheese from the same region, with toasted rosehip bread and gewürztraminer jelly with a magnificent 2012 Grossi Laue Gewürztraminer. The cheese was perfectly matured but not over-ripe and the touch of sweetness in the accompaniments were just enough to enhance the opulence of the wine.

You can still buy the 2012 from Hedonism in London for £48.40 which is obviously not cheap but you could obviously substitute a less expensive gewürztraminer, though ideally with a couple of years bottle age. And you can find Petit Munster in good speciality cheese shops like the Fine Cheese Company

I also loved a dish of stonebass with razor clams, monks beard, fennel and wild garlic with Hugel’s 2014 Jubilee riesling - again quite bold flavours to partner with a mature wine but the riesling stood up to it.

For other gewürztraminer pairings see The best food pairings for Gewürztraminer.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Mere.

Celtic Promise and cider brandy

The hardest cheeses to match are washed rind cheeses - those stinky, orange rinded ones like Epoisses - but last week I found a new pairing: a 3 year old cider brandy.

It was in a great little cheese shop which has been opened in Bayswater by Rhuaridh Buchanan, the guy who used to run the Paxton & Whitfield's maturing rooms. Most of the cheeses he sells go to London’s top restaurants but he sells a limited amount, which he matures himself, from the shop. You can sample them on the spot round the small café table - there’s a small selection of wines, beers and spirits on display you can order by the glass.

Celtic Promise is a cows’ cheese which is made by John Savage of Caws Teifi in Ceredigion in West Wales to a Caerphilly recipe and is washed in cider. Although it’s not massively stinky - at least this one wasn’t - it's rich enough to defeat most wines, particularly reds, but the young brandy - a fresh, appley 3 year old from the Somerset Cider Brandy Company - was just perfect. The company’s Kingston Black aperitif would work too as, of course, would a young Calvados.

Soumaintrain and Chablis

There were many great pairings to pick from in Chablis last week but the one I’m going for is a cheese I was relatively unfamiliar with: Soumaintrain

It’s an unpasteurised soft cow’s milk cheese from burgundy that is washed with brine and Marc de Bourgogne (a grappa-like spirit) but generally has a creamier texture and less pungent flavour than Epoisses - or at least it did in the Chablis region where the exterior of the cheese is ivory white rather than yellow or orange.

I think younger cheeses work best with a younger Chablis or premier cru Chablis of, say, 2-3 years old while more mature ones benefit from a vieilles vignes (old vines), older vintages or a grand cru Chablis. I’m not sure I’d open a grand cru especially for the cheese course but if you were drinking one with the main course it would work perfectly with the cheese. Much better than most red burgundy, in my opinion.

More to follow on Chablis pairings in due course . . .

Epoisses and marc de Bourgogne

Epoisses has to be one of the most difficult cheeses to match, not least when it gets to the almost liquid stage shown in this photo (a stage too far IMHO)

It’s one of France’s most notorious ‘stinky’ cheeses - so described because the process of washing the rind in marc de Bourgogne contributes to the cheese’s pungent smell and fluid texture.

The locals like to drink it with red Burgundy (the natural terroir-based match as it's also made in the Côte d’Or) but in my view it almost always slaughters the wine. It’s also - unlike many cheeses - a bit rough on the local dry whites.

The most successful matches I’ve come across are Sauternes, strong Belgian beers and, on my recent trip last week, marc de Bourgogne itself which makes a lot of sense given that it’s used in the cheese’s production. It’s strong but then so is the cheese and it’s woodiness and spiciness deal better with its bitter notes than the intense sweetness of fortified wines like port (though I suspect drier Madeiras and possibly whisky could work too).

If you feel deprived if you don’t have a glass of red wine in your hand while you’re eating cheese try a strong funky red (an old vintage of Chteauneuf-du-Ppe, for example). We tried a slightly less far gone cheese at the Beaune wine bar Le Comptoir des Tontons with Philippe Jambon’s Les OH de Balmont, a vin de table from a natural wine producer in in Beaujolais and they paired remarkably well.