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pairings

A perfect cheese needs the perfect wine -- or beer -- or tea. Find out what pairings will please your palate.

Franc-ly Speaking

As spring's fresh cheeses arrive, some wine lovers see red
By Tara Q. Thomas

When my editor at culture asked if I could match a red wine to spring's fresh cheeses, I answered, "Sure," although I was not sure at all I could find said red wine. After all, Sauvignon Blanc is the classic pairing; who needs anything else?

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Turning a New Leaf

Inspired pairings of tea and cheese
By Cynthia Gold

Every tea drinker knows that rich Devonshire cream and a fresh scone with full-bodied black tea is an ideal pairing. As are cream cheese-based tea sandwiches served with a Darjeeling or an Earl Grey. Few of us question why these tea and cheese flavors work so well together, yet we often stop there in exploring this category of satisfying tandem tastes.

Properly matched, tea and cheese offer complex and well-balanced flavors. The criteria used for cheese-tea pairings is virtually identical to those followed for serving cheese with wine-but without the need to balance acid levels or observe the "pair by region" guidelines (because the major tea-growing regions are not cheese-producing regions). As with wine, some teas are more versatile than others and are good to keep around for impromptu pairings.

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Pour Vous

French "grower Champagnes" and small-batch
sparkling wines are worthy of your best cheese
By Tara Q. Thomas

It started when Artisanal Cheese Center moved in down the street from our Manhattan offices. Instead of getting cake for an office birthday, my boss ran over to the cheese mecca for a single perfect …poisses. Common wine advice for …poisses calls for something like chardonnay, but the occasion was a good excuse for bubbles. As it turns out, stinky cheese and Champagne beats cake, hands down.

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Domestic Tranquility

American barley wines pair perfectly with stateside cheeses
By Andy Jenkins

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to disparage the longstanding relationship that cheese and wine have enjoyed over the past gazillion years. That's a lot of history. I'm not going to suggest that beer and cheese are far more natural and effective companions, when compared to wine and cheese. No, no-I'm not saying that here. That discussion may have to wait for Culture's second issue.

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Sherry Makes Its Case


This versatile Spanish wine is a convincing match for many cheeses
By Tara Q. Thomas

A small glass of dry Sherry and a slice of Manchego: that was the very first thing I put in my mouth when I arrived in Sevilla, Spain. It was only appropriate, since I was headed to Jerez, where this curious wine is made. But that little introduction inspired an obsession I haven’t been able to let go of since.

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Cider Houses Rule

Be won over by a glass of grown-up apple juice
By Andy Jenkins

My Midwestern childhood brought with it some obligatory seasonal traditions: Sweet corn in the summer. Snow shoveling in the winter. Mud puddles come spring. And, of course, an annual visit to our local apple orchard in the fall — complete with apple picking, apple fritters, apple butter, and apple juice.

It didn’t occur to me back then that a little bit of commercial yeast, when added to that freshly pressed juice, could create a wonderful version of apple juice that makes you feel funny after a few glasses. The idea occurred to the English at some point around 55 B.C., when the Roman Empire arrived to find the locals sipping on some sort of apple-based libation.

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Port-ability American Port-style wines come into season; blue cheese lovers, take note

By Tara Q. Thomas

See the wine list

Every holiday season I dream of blue cheese; at Saxelby Cheese, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, these dreams
come true. In a space slightly larger than a broom closet, Anne Saxelby stocks an amazing array of American cheeses, including more than a half-dozen intriguing blues. On a recent visit, I walked away with a creamy, milky-looking round of Maytag Blue, a gorgeous, blue-tinged chunk of Jasper Hill Bayley Hazen, and a wedge of Cayuga Blue from Lively Run Goat Dairy in the Finger Lakes region of New York State before it occurred to me that three blues on one cheese plate might be overkill.

Or it might have been just what I was looking for: a hedonistic, blue cheese bender.

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Mead Goes Modern: The age-old craft of fermenting honey offers new cheese pairing choices

By Andy Jenkins

Mead Festival in Denver, Colorado. Despite the varying style guidelines for this competition, the ingredients in question haven’t varied one iota since mead’s early days. Plain and simple, mead is made from honey, water, and yeast.

Different classifications of mead, however, will introduce adjuncts into the mix. Pyment is mead fermented with grapes. Metheglin is mead made with herbs and spices. Melomel is mead with berries. Cyser is mead made with apple cider. The stuff can be sweet or dry, still or sparkling. It can have notes of warming alcohol (14 to 18 percent) or can be downright gulpable. Just like a grape varietal dictates the flavor and color of a wine, honeys from different flowers can define a mead’s terroir. If the honey comes from bees that have been pollinating orange blossoms, for instance, the mead may have wonderful aromas of vibrant citrus.

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