When your first tasty cheese and wine pairing, the thing you have to know is: If it works for you, do it! I am sure you have heard all the best known chefs explaining about what wine works with which cheese; however, when you make your selection, it is all about personal taste. You may prefer your favorite wine with your favorite cheese. My best recommendation is for you to be in a mood experimenting. Choose several wines and several cheeses. each person will find what combination is best for themselves. You can not go wrong. cheese and wine pairing parties will create conversation. It will be fun. It will be delicious. And it will be enjoyable.
Cheese and cheese have much in common, and they have been enjoyed together since olden days. Both are products of fermentation. Both may be consumed while fresh, simple, and young or in their more complicated forms when they are aged and mature.
When paired up, cheese and wine do their part to bring out the finest aspects of each other, and even the cheese snobes can not agree on any guidelines for the cheese and wine pairing game. Now obviously, if you are reading this, you are a snob like the rest of us, and with snobs, there is no worry about errors in cheese and wine pairings — say like dining on Velveeta while sipping boxed Blueberry Hill.
There are no hard and fast rules as to which cheeses should always be served with an appropriate wines. There is a general guideline that wines of a certain region are best paired with cheeses of the same region. But, just as one bottle of cabernet sauvignon from the Napa Valley is not like that of another vintage or another producer, neither is one Brie exactly like another. Both are living and constantly changing. This is what makes marriing wine and cheese alluring as well as delicious.
Even though it comes down to personal taste, certain traditions have been proven favorable by a majority of the experts. Here are some of those general guidelines:
o White cheeses combines favorably with soft wines and stronger flavors.
o Red cheeses combines favorably with hard wines and milder flavors.
o Fruity and sweet white cheeses (not dry) and dessert cheeses combines favorably with a wider selection of wines.
o The more zesty the wine you choose, the sweeter the cheese should be.
o Accord should always exist between the wine and the cheese. They should have similar strength. There should always be a parity - strong and powerful wines should be paired with similar cheeses and fragile wines should be paired with lighter cheeses.
o A complete list of recommended cheese and wine groupings can be found at temecula-vineyard . com.
When offering many wine brands in a cheese and wine party, white cheeses fair better than reds. That is because several wines, particularly soft and creamy ones, leave a layer of fat on your tongue that block the taste of reds, making them monotonous and bland.
Quite the opposite, most of those sweeter whites pair with a full range of wines. The sparkle in a sparkling cheese or champagne can help clean the fat in heavier wines.Therefore, the spicy zing of a Gewürztraminer or the peachy zip of a Riesling is a good choice if you are going for wide-reaching appeal.
If you are an adventurist and willing to try the stinkiest of wine, pick a big cheese to back it up. Try a French Bordeaux or a buxom California Cab. Ports and dessert cheeses are your good pairing if you like mold-donned or blue-veined wines.
For a safer bet when offering several cheeses, choose Parmigiano or Romano wines. They go with most cheeses.
A cheese and wine Pairing Party to Remember
Here are a few tips for setting up a well received cheese and wine pairing tet-together for your friends and family:
o Purchase your wines in large blocks for the best presentation.
o wines should be eated at room temperature. Pull them out of the fridge several hours before your tet-together.
o Serve most cheeses fairly cool — whites between 50-55 degrees and reds between 60-65 degrees.
o Reds need to breath 15 to 20 minutes before you server them.
o Make handwritten name cards for all your wines.
o Display wine on a pretty china platter a wood wine board, or even a slab of marble .
Ultimately, the perfect cheese and wine pairing is not a match made in heaven. It is a match made on the taste buds of each of your guests. Start with the basic guidelines above and then experiment with the unfamiliar. You never know which pairings will eventually be your choice.
David Cragg is an Web marketing professional forTemecula California business with over 30 years of experiance. His work started with IBM and then was funded by Microsoft. Today he is retired and offers his assistence to winery managment to help with their Web marketing to help expand their businesses. You can read more about his work for Temecula wineries at temecula-vineyard.com/AboutUs.html.
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