1. Spoonwood Cabin Feta with Carrot Cumin Purée (p. 145)
2. Crémeux des Augustins with Mushroom Duxelles (p. 150)
3. Red Hawk with Blood Orange Fennel Chip (p. 146)
4. Barely Buzzed with Anise Meringue (p. 148)
5. Rogue River Blue with Toasted Walnut Pesto (p. 150)
You can go in one of two directions when pairing beverages with cheese plates: intellectual or emotional. The intellectual style involves choosing one beverage for each cheese, as we have done on page 138, where we have paired a manzanilla sherry with feta from Spoonwood Cabin in Vermont, a Prosecco with Crémeux des Augustins, a pinot noir with Red Hawk from Cowgirl Creamery in Sonoma, an espresso stout with Barely Buzzed from Beehive Cheese in Utah, and a sake with Rogue River Blue from Rogue Creamery in Oregon.
When you pair like this, each bite and each sip is an experiment, an education in taste combinations. Each pairing is a topic for you and your guests to study. You taste a cheese by itself, then sip the beverage. You then taste the cheese with its condiment and consider the pairing. You nod knowingly at your tasting companions, then sip the beverage again and see how the drink changes the whole combination. You take notes.
For the right group of people at the right time, this can be a great experience. It can be fun—intellectual, dorky, geeky, nerdy, left-brain fun. For a lot of people, and in a lot of situations, however, this intellectual pairing can be too much work, and it can seem kind of obnoxious or intimidating. That’s why, for most people, most of the time, it makes more sense to keep it simple—or emotional.
The emotional style is to pick a beverage that you like and that, in a broad sense, goes well with cheese. With a nice bottle of pinot noir or a good microbrewed beer, you can relax and enjoy the cheese plate and the beverage without being distracted by either. You can create the cheese plate and then decide what to drink with it, but we recommend choosing the beverage first—say, a bottle of wine—and then creating a plate that will pair well with it. It also works well for everyone to choose a beverage of his or her own.
Most of the time when we sit down at the table we are there to commune with other human beings. That means we want to tell stories and make each other laugh and feel and connect. If we want to think, we want to think about our friends, not the chemical makeup of our food and its effects on our palates. We want to feed our souls while we fill our bellies. The cheese and the wine do both, but we want to leave room for the conversation.
For this reason, we do not normally serve flights of wine or beverage pairings at Casellula. We will do so upon request, but we are rarely asked. Most white wines, sparkling wines, beers, sakes, sherries, ports, meads, and Madeiras are very good with a broad range of cheeses. Many red wines are, too. So relax, and choose to drink something you like. Chances are it’s not going to screw up the cheese plate, and it will make you happy.
What makes us the happiest to drink with our cheese plate is bubbles. When you take a bite of cheese, your mouth becomes coated with protein and fat molecules. If you then take a sip of Champagne, Prosecco, Cava, or a good craft beer, the acid and the bubbles clean the fat right off your tongue and refresh your palate. That makes you want to have another bite of cheese, which makes you want to take a sip of your drink, and back and forth you go, with fat, protein, bubbles, and acid playing an exciting mixed-doubles tennis match on your tongue.
This is not to say that we don’t like other beverages with our cheese plates. Really, we are most likely to drink whatever we are having with our meal with our cheese plates, and in most cases that means wine or beer. Most white wines serve a broad range of cheeses very well. The wine has acid and the cheese has fat, and they are going to play around together on your palate. We would shy away from heavy, oaky chardonnays, but otherwise drink what you like. (Remember, there are no rules, so drink all the chardonnay you want if that’s your thing.)
If you want to broaden your white wine horizons a little, try a gewürztraminer (spicy, sometimes a little sweet), grüner veltliner (crisp like fresh apples), or albariño (a versatile Spanish wine that goes with everything). Rieslings, which range from the cloyingly sweet to the elegantly dry, can be great with cheese plates. The different levels of sweetness work with different cheeses in different ways and for different palates. We like a midlevel sweetness, but choose the sweetness level you like and dive in.
When drinking reds with a range of cheeses, we lean toward the light bodied, and that usually points to pinot noir. The best of them, from Burgundy, the Willamette Valley, New Zealand, Austria, and Italy, are light in body but full of flavor and high in acid—and therefore perfect with many, many cheeses. But pinots aren’t the only light red wines. Gamay, which is the grape in Beaujolais, can be beautiful. We’re not talking about Beaujolais Nouveau, the unaged homage to quick cash flow that emerges from France every November. We are talking about Beaujolais Cru, which are wines that can be as complex and delicious as any. We also like grignolino, gaglioppo, barbera, dolcetto, and mencía with our cheese plates. If you like full-bodied red wines such as cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel, or malbec, we suggest you lean toward hard, aged cheeses that have the strength to stand up to the alcohol in those wines.
Craft beers come in all styles, so there is something for every kind of cheese. You can aim to pair specific flavors, drinking fruity beers with fruity cheeses and nutty beers with nutty cheeses and so on. Or you can think more broadly and drink a light lager or ale with softer, more delicate cheeses and a heavier stout or porter with aged cheeses. There will be no end to the experimenting, though, as there are more beers and cheeses available than you will ever get to!
Plenty of professionals out there will tell you that this beverage goes with this cheese. They are very often right about a particular pairing, and we get as excited about those moments as anyone else. But the truth is that many different beverage pairings work for each cheese and for each cheese platter, and what is right depends on the person doing the tasting. So you do you. Think in broad strokes to find one beverage that complements a variety of cheeses, which is how you will be eating and drinking most of the time. Think creatively when you are pairing more specifically. The only rule that matters is: if you like it, it’s good!