Cheese and wine revisited

Pairing cheese and wine was once a no-brainer. In that post-rationing era when the British were just rediscovering wine, and had no idea what to drink it with, cheese and wine evenings provided an answer. Cubes of Cheddar on cocktail sticks made the vin rouge taste a little nicer, and were a useful way of soaking up the alcohol.

Since then, the whole business has become unconscionably more complicated, so much so that matching wine to cheese is now considered to be at the more technical end of gastronomy. How can one wine sort out the three or four types of cheese you may have on your plate? Not to mention the fact that, at a certain level of sophistication, it is virtually impossible to find anyone who admits to the Jurassic vulgarism of drinking red wine with cheese any longer.

The answer lies in not eating more than one cheese at once. Or it may equally lie in the approach of Laurent Michel at London’s L’Oranger, the wonderfully unreconstructed restaurant franais in St James’s, a relaxed haven of oak panelling and the kind of gargantuan floral displays that are possibly visible from space. Here, a newly launched lunch menu, now being offered for both private and corporate groups, proceeds through a series of cheese-based dishes.

That might sound like a digestive challenge, but the weight and textural impact of the whole affair is nicely judged, at least if the inaugural menu presented in late February was anything to go by. These were matched to an imaginative selection of wines chosen by L’Oranger sommelier Lucio Penetra.

We began with a stunning presentation of variations on artichokes and cheese. Served from a plate fashioned from a cross-section of tree trunk was a gratinated terrine of globe artichoke mixed with Beaufort from the French Alps, wrapped in ribbons of smoked duck. Alongside this was a quenelle of artichoke and Comt pure.

These are strongly flavoured cow’s milk-cheeses that worked beautifully with the assertive flavour of artichoke, which is itself theoretically supposed to pummel any wine into submission. In fact, the match with a Vermentino di Gallura, Arakena 2004, from Sardinia was inspired. The oxidative style of this deeply coloured white was highly successful with the richness of the cheeses, and even stood up well to the smokiness of the meat.

Next up was a highly complex dish that involved tiger prawns in a Caesar dressing, stuffed into a vertical cylinder of Parmesan tuile, secured to the plate with a little pool of pineapple syrup, accompanied by garnishes of roasted vine tomatoes and pink grapefruit. The accumulation of flavours in this was admirably conceived. Who’d have thought prawns and cheese and pineapple (the topping of a nightmare pizza, surely?) could work together so gracefully?

Or indeed that one wine could cope with the array of savoury and sweet elements so well? Devois des Agneaux d’Aumelas 2005 is a Coteaux du Languedoc white blended from Grenache Blanc and Clairette. Pitched midway between mineral austerity and lactic richness, it tasted a little like quality Pinot Gris, and had a tropical fruit note teased out of it by the Caesar prawn mixture. It matched the dish for weight, and its delicate oak produced the right degree of roundness on the palate.

Our main course reverted to more traditional territory, being a serving of medium-cooked Aberdeen Angus fillet in a red wine reduction with fondant potato, spinach and mushroom duxelles. Its cheese component turned up in a little breadcrumbed beignet of the beef marrow with Fourme d’Ambert, the celebrated blue cow’s-milk cheese of the Auvergne.We ate this with a St-Joseph 2004, L’Arzelle, a wine produced by a triumvirate of Rhone glitterati – Cuilleron, Gaillard and Villard. This was hearty north Rhone Syrah with big purple fruit and hefty extract, as well as the kind of obstreperous tannin that suggested we had got it out of bed about three years too early. It handled the surprisingly sinewy beef quite well, but the match with the blue cheese was, for me, as grating as juxta-collisions of blue mould and tannin always are.

With the final course, we took leave of our collective senses with a platter that delivered ricotta and rocket sorbet lollipops to be dipped in raspberry compote, and fragile breadcrumbed sticks of brousse (whey cheese) for dunking in sweetened mayonnaise, this last element astonishingly repellent.Gustatory chaos reigned, an affray from which the Domaine de Seigneur 2006 rosé from Lirac (a southern Rhne blend of Mourvdre, Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah) kept itself well clear and out of trouble. It might have conceded a suspicion of red fruit to the raspberry compote, but that was about it.

As if in homage to the way things used to be done, we were seen on our way with a little plate of two cheeses, presented au naturel with biscuits, dried apricots and walnuts. These were Shorrocks’ black-waxed Lancashire bomb, a cheese with all the authoritative, mustardy pungency of year-old Cheddar, and a sliver of mature, deliquescent Epoisses.

With these, Penetra had chosen a Reserve Chablis 2000 from J Moreau. This had reached that stage of waxy, honeyed maturity that reminds why you’re always missing the point of Chablis if you drink it too young. It grappled manfully with the Lancashire, sustaining only superficial bruising in the process, but turned its encounter with the Epoisses into an elegantly gliding pas de deux.

Stuart Walton is a long-serving food and wine writer, a contributor to the Good Food Guide, and author of The Right Food with the Right Wine.

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