Will Studd's tips for matching cheese and wine

Those of you who are lucky enough to live in Oz have the enticing prospect of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival coming up next month - a two week extravaganza of feasts, workshops and tastings with some of the country's top foodies and wine experts.

I thought the rest of you who, like me, are shivering in the Northern hemisphere (will the weather EVER warm up?) might like the chance to vicariously enjoy a couple of the sessions in the 'Perfect Match', a weekend of seminars on food and wine pairing.

First, I put a few questions to cheese expert Will Studd of Cheese Slices who is hosting a wine and cheese seminar with Steve Flamsteed of Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander in the Yarra Valley.

So, Will, what should we be thinking about in wine terms when we're matching cheese?

Cheese and wine matching is all about taste and texture and is usually based on finding a complementary or contrasting balance of flavours and textures. There are no firm rules and you can have a lot fun trying the myriad of possible combinations but the starting point is always to look for similarities of character and strength.

Can you give some examples of the styles of wines that work best with individual cheeses?

Goat’s milk cheeses are extraordinarily versatile in matching with wine. The lingering, creamy flavours of a fresh goat cheese go particularly well with sparkling wines or fresh, crisp whites such as Sauvignon Blanc with a dry finish. Pinot Gris is particularly good with creamy surface-ripened goat cheeses matured under a wrinkled geotrichum rind, while semi-hard and mature goat cheeses are more at home with juicy, fruity reds with soft tannins such as Pinot Noir and Merlot and even robust aged reds.

And some of the ones that don't hit it off so well?

Regrettably countless bottles of expensive red wine are ritually wasted on cheese matching, perhaps because cheese is often served at a time in the meal when red wine is still on the table. This is particularly the case in Australia where red wines often contain a lot of tannin. This astringent substance is a natural enemy to the creamy, lactic flavours of many locally soft surface mould-ripened cheeses and blue mould-ripened cheeses which tend to be high in fat leading to nasty bitter, angular, hollow, metallic or even mousy flavours.

Are there other ingredients/sides you can bring to the party that makes a pairing more likely to work?

Light sourdough bread or crispy baguette are the ideal accompaniments with cheese - bread, wine and cheese are the holy trinity in France.

Apples are great for cleansing the palate when tasting different types of cheese. There's an old adage which says ‘Buy on apples and sell on cheese', the idea being that, while apple cleanses and sharpens the palate, the fatty coating of cheese can easily hide imperfections in wine. By offering potential customers cheese when they were tasting wine, a wine merchant could make the wine seem smoother and richer than it really was.

Surprise me with a match I'd never think would work and tell me why it does

2 year old Cravero Parmigiano Reggiano is a great companion with an Australian sparkling burgundy (not sure you're allowed to call it that these days, Will ;-)

The effervescent sparkling acidity of the wine slices through the fine crumbly texture of this hard cooked cheese emphasising both the condensed caramel sweetness and the heady perfume in the wine.

Will Studd and Steve Flamsteed's The Classic Wine and Cheese is on at 10am-11.15am on Saturday March 9th. Lucky you if you can get there . . .

Pairing cheese and claret

I’ve always had a bit of a problem finding cheese matches for red Bordeaux. Cheddar is often suggested but I find mature versions have too much ‘bite’. Stilton slays it and so do most washed rind cheeses, oozy Camemberts and Bries . . .

The most successful match I’ve found so far is Mimolette so maybe it was auto-suggestion at work when I tasted a deep orange Red Leicester at The Fine Cheese Co’s Cheese Fair in Bath at the weekend and immediately thought of red Bordeaux.

It was the Sparkenhoe Red Leicester from David and Jo Clarke of the Leicestershire Handmade Cheese Co. a revival of an old recipe and a lovely mellow, typically English cheese. Extraordinarily it hasn’t actually been made in Leicestershire for 20 years and for even longer - over 50 years - on a farm in the county.

It has more flavour than milder cheeses like Caerphilly and Wensleydale which are better suited to a white wine in my opinion but lacks the intensity of a farmhouse cheddar which can sometimes throw a medium to full-bodied red. I tried it with a bottle of André Lurton’s 2004 Chateau La Louvire Pessac-Lognan from Bibendum, a mature Bordeaux of exactly the sort you might bring out with the cheese over Christmas and it was perfect.

Coincidentally I tried another aged Bordeaux (a 1999 Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin which was drinking quite beautifully) with cheese the following day and found that although it was again overpowered by a ripe Brie it went really well with a Vacherin Mont d’Or, a combination I’d never have expected. I think it was probably because the cheese wasn’t that mature and the wine was. The problem with reds and cheese is mainly about unintegrated tannins. Older vintages seem to survive better.

• You can buy Sparkenhoe from The Fine Cheese Company and other stockists listed here.

Photo by Ray Piedra

Pairing Cheese and Champagne

Cheese and champagne might not sound like natural bedfellows but if you think about the pairing for a moment you immediately realise they have quite a thing going. Many canapés - like gougères and cheese straws - are made with cheese for example and go wonderfully well with champagne but what about individual cheeses?

I had the opportunity to taste a range of cheeses with champagne recently and came to a few new conclusions.

• Mild slightly chalky cheeses work well. The classic example is Chaource, a cheese which is often paired with champagne but a mild but flavourful cheese like Gorwydd Caerphilly is good too. Very mild cheese like Mozzarella is an undemanding but also slightly uninteresting match

• Rosé champagne seems a more flexible partner than ordinary non-vintage. We tried two - a Moet rosé and a Benoit Marguet Grand Cru Rosé and they both showed well, particularly with Mistralou (goats cheese wrapped in chestnut leaf) and a Brie de Meaux. But a stronger goats’ cheese killed the Marguet stone dead so you need to take care.

• An Ossau Iraty sheeps cheese went well with most of the champagnes - the slightly nutty taste and smooth texture of hard sheeps’ cheese seems a good foil to champagne

• Washed rind cheeses as usual are tricky. If they’re not too mature, like the Reblochon and Langres we tried, they may work but if they’ve been allowed to get very mature like an incredibly gooey St Marcellin they’ll slaughter champagne (along with most other wines)

• Strong blues, as might be expected, are quite overwhelming but the creamy texture of Stichelton, an unpasteurised verson of Stilton, made it an unexpectedly good match for an elegant low dosage Jacquesson 732 (though coming mainly from the 2004 vintage it has quite a bit of bottle age)

• Parmesan is probably the ultimate champagne cheese - a case of umami meets umami

In general the stronger the cheese the older and more powerful the champagne you need. A mature Comté for example overwhelmed the fresh-tasting non-vintage champagnes but I suspect would have been great with an older champagne or a Prestige Cuve like Krug.

I shall just have to carry on experimenting ;-)

Image by delo from Pixabay

How to organise a beer and cheese tasting

Today my son Will and I did an artisan cheese and craft beer tasting at the Great British Beer Festival to promote our new book An Appetite for Ale (due out at the end of September. Hint.) It seemed to go down well so I thought it might be something you’d enjoy trying at home with your friends.

What we were aiming to show was not only how good beer is with cheese but to come up with some unexpected pairings that might impress any non-beer drinkers in the party. Here’s what we tasted and why.

Goats’ cheese and wheat beer
An ideal pairing to kick off this kind of tasting, both goats cheese and wheatbeer are very versatile, ideal for this time of year. The goats’ cheese was a Golden Cross from Sussex - a goats’ cheese log that was quite well matured and the beer a bière blanche called Colomba from Corsica flavoured with the wild plants of the Corsican Maquis (densely wooded hillsides). The lemony herbal notes of the beer picked up perfectly on the slightly acid cheese. It’s a style of beer I really like to drink with goats’ cheese salads. Any witbier or bière blanche would work equally well.

Camembert and Kriek
Kriek is the famous sour Belgian fruit beer made with cherries. We used Liefman’s for the tasting which has a particularly refreshing sour (but not sharp) cherry flavour. The Camembert we paired it with was an artisanal cheese from Normandy, again well-matured which meant that the rind was a little bitter for the beer. A younger example would have been a better match. The fresh fruity flavours of the beer are a great contrast to the creamy paste (the central part of the cheese).

Cheddar and American IPA
Cheddar is generally paired with pale ales or bitters in this country but they can get overwhelmed if the cheese is very strong. This was the case with this award-winning unpasteurised Montgomery’s cheddar from Somerset which was about 14 months old. I like this style of cheese better with an American IPA which are stronger, sweeter and more hoppy than their typical British counterparts. The one we used at the tasting was a great favourite of Will’s and mine, Goose Island. We were amused to see on their website that they also recommend it with Cajun food and carrot cake!

Washed rind cheese and strong Belgian Trappist ale
A classic pairing from Belgium. The beer we used was Chimay Blue which at 9% is the strongest beer in the Chimay range. The monks also make a washed rind style of cheese but we chose a British example from Gloucestershire, Stinking Bishop from Charles Martell. So called not because of its odour (which has been compared to unwashed socks) but because the rind of the cheese is washed with perry made from the Stinking Bishop pear. It’s the kind of cheese-lovers’ cheese which totally annihilates red wine but the sweet, strong Chimay more than held its own. You could also try it with a French cheese like Epoisses or Livarot.

Stilton and porter
The first of two pairings with Stilton. This, on the face of it was the more unlikely combination. Anchor Porterfrom San Francisco with its dark, bitter flavour of coffee grounds and mature Colston Bassett, one of the most highly regarded Stiltons, the kind of cheese with which you’d normally reach for the port. But in fact the two got on like a house on fire, the bitterness of the blue-veined cheese rounding out the flavours of the beer, the beer providing a refreshing contrast to the cheese. They looked great together too. Magic.

Stilton and Barley Wine
With the same cheese we then put up a barley wine, a Thomas Hardy Ale from O’Hanlons of Devon. At a stonking 11.7% it’s not for the fainthearted - wonderfully rich and sweet with intense dried fruit flavours. The brewer says it will keep for 25 years. It behaved much more like a port with the cheese, providing a rich, sweet contrast. Personally I would have liked some kind of dried fruits like raisins or Medjool dates to nibble with the combination but it was pretty good on its own.

When we asked the audience which beer they preferred with the Stilton about 60% preferred the porter and 40% the barley wine so which way you go is a question of personal taste.

We finished off the tasting (and you could finish off your evening) by showing how well three of the beers also went with desserts, partnering the Kriek with a creamy cheesecake (one of my favourite pairings), the porterwith a70% dark organic chocolate (which it offset like an espresso coffee) and the barley wine with a classic English fruitcake. The last two were uncannily alike but the great thing about beer is that its palate-refreshing carbonation enables you to partner it with a similar ingredient without one cancelling out the flavour of the other.

The Great British Beer Festival is on at Earl’s Court until Saturday evening. Visit www.gbbf.org.uk

Image by Orna from Pixabay