Wine and Cheese on the Fly, Part 2
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007Roger flew into the kitchen around 6:15 to tell me that he was about to serve our wine and cheese tasting party their first wine, Pol Roger Brut NV Champagne, and I was a little worried. Champagne is so delicate and so subtle; it’s hard to find a cheese that won’t bully it. I tried it with a youngish raw milk French goat’scheese, Chabichou de Poitou, but it left the bubbly tasting bitter. Same thing happened with the cow’s milk great, Jasper Hill’s Constant Bliss. So, I decided to go with only one cheese, Nettle Meadow Farm’s Kunik, a triple-creme goat’s milk cheese from New York State, fortified with Jersey cream. With a little dollop of our pastry department’s kumquat marmalade, the trio turned into a perfect summer snack, like eating an apricot scone topped with clotted cream, followed by a sip of mimosa.
Next came both the Chabichou and the Bliss, as well as Tomme de la Chataigneraie (nutty, creamy, mildly goaty deliciousness from Auvergne) with an Arneis from Piedmont, from a producer called Pertinace, a white with both body and acidity.
Then we served duo of Pecorini (Pecorino Zaffrano from Tuscany, raw sheep’s milk, rubbed with saffron; and Pecorino Ginepro from Lazio, rubbed with balsamic vinegar and crushed juniper) with an unusual Italian red made from the Uva Rara grape (a.k.a. Bonarda), and the slight vegetal and earthy character of the wine met the cheese nicely.
My favorite pairing was the fourth: Tomme Crayeuse, Cabot Cloth-bound Cheddar Aged at Jasper Hill, and Chevrotin with the Cabernet-dominated Mas de Daumas Gassac 2004 from Languedoc, France. Wow. That one kinda floored us. The wine was so meaty and gamey; rich but not cloying; ripe but distinguishable from a New World wine. Cheddar tends to do well with earthy Cabernets; the other two, a cow and a goat from the Haute Savoie, both super mountainy, were in great form that night, and it took one look from Roger when we checked out the wine on his hunch to see that we were thinking the same thing.
Our couple decided to end at five cheese courses, and I can’t really blame them. (That’s a whole lotta cheese). But we were happy we had the chance to serve a Sherry, Gonzalez-Byass’ “Apostoles” Palo Cortado, and to pair it with the Comte-like Pleasant Ridge Reserve Extra Aged and Jasper Hill Farm’s Bartlett Blue, a lovely way to close any night. So lovely, in fact, that that’s precisely how I ended my night several hours later: copita in one hand, dense hunk of cow love in the other.