Pairing Cheese with Wine

Pairing Cheese with Wine - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. When most people think cheese, the natural pair to that is wine. Most people love to drink a glass of wine with a good cheese. So there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind when you are going to do that. Just as with any food, you want to make sure that the complexity of the wine matches the complexity of the cheese. If you have a very one-note cheese, you can have a very one-note wine. If you have a complex cheese that has a lot of bold flavors, you want to make sure that you pair it with a very, very bold wine. The lighter the flavor, the lighter the wine. You do not want to put, for example, a very strong blue cheese with an extremely light wine like a Sauvignon Blanc. It will not pair well. You need to keep that in mind. Also, you need to keep in mind what you are serving the cheese with. Many people will serve cheese with a variety of fruits and crackers, and things of that nature. If you have fruits or other items on your cheese plate, if you can find a wine that has those same fruit notes or those same flavors as the other items on your cheese plate, that wine will naturally pair better with the cheese plate that you have served. One very classic pairing is using a champagne with a triple creme brie or a Camembert. Again, those have nice light flavors, but they are very, very rich. If you have a very, very rich cheese, you need something nice and crisp to counteract the richness. So champagne, with its bubbles, work very very well with brie or possibly a nice slice of bread. Maybe a couple of apple slices would be a very lovely pairing. Also, you can use some of the fortified wines that are available to you, such as a port. Those tend to go with very, very strong cheeses because the sweetness counteracts the heaviness of the cheese. I personally like a nice, tawny port with a very strong blue cheese. It makes me very happy inside. So those are some basic rules when it comes to pairing wines with cheeses.