Match of the week | Maroilles and premier cru Chablis

Match of the week

Maroilles and premier cru Chablis

Visitors to this website will be used to my recommending white wine with cheese by now but I didn’t anticipate how good this particular combination would be.

I had opted for the cheese course - a generous hunk of Maroilles - at La Cour de Rémi, the hotel near the Channel we always try and visit on our last night in France and was misguidedly expecting the slightly funky Château le Puy 2007 we'd been drinking our main course to get by with it.

But in fact the premier cru Chablis we'd had with our first course - a 2010 Vieilles Vignes Montée de Tonnerre from Domaine Guy Robin was infinitely better, cutting through the rich cheese like a slice of apple.

Up to now I’ve thought you need a touch of sweetness in whites if they're to pair successfully with washed-rind cheeses but this was bone dry, though it admittedly might not have coped with a riper cheese. With those, I think you’d still be better off with an off-dry aromatic wine like a pinot gris or gewürztraminer or, better still, a Trappist beer or bière de garde from the same region as the cheese.

Still, if you don’t have any of those to hand looks Chablis will do - and probably improve with age.

Incidentally while I was looking for a link to a description of Maroilles cheese I found this very simple and delicious-looking Tarte Maroilles on the BBC Good Food website you might want to try.

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Comments: 1 (Add)

Christopher Hardy on January 10 2014 at 13:06

I was interested to see this come up on Twitter. I love the Maroilles at La Cour de Rémi and ate it on two occasions this week. By way of contrast, I tried it with the Condrieu la Solarie 2010 of Gilles Barge (a nice Condrieu - less over-the-top than Guigal) and the Pommard 1er Cru Les Epenots 2010 of Muzard. My impression was that the Condrieu made the cheese sing and the cheese made the Pommard sing. On the second occasion I had run out of Pommard and was on a half bottle of Saumur Champigny of Lydie and Thierry Chancelle. That was good, too, but nothing like the explosive combination of Maroilles/Pommard. They certainly have a wonderful Maroilles at La Cour!

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