Serve only cheap wine with Cheese...
Jan. 23rd, 2006 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lsandersonCheese smothers wine flavours
Next time you are organising a cheese and wine party, don't waste your money on quality wine. Cheese masks the subtle flavours that mark out a good wine, so your guests won't be able to tell that you are serving them cheap stuff.
Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann of the University of California, Davis, presented trained wine tasters with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavours and aromas in each wine both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses.
They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including berry and oak flavours, sourness and astringency. Only butter aroma was enhanced by cheese, and that is probably because cheese itself contains the molecule responsible for a buttery wine aroma, Heymann says. Strong cheeses suppressed flavours more than milder cheeses, but flavours of all wines were suppressed. In other words, there are no magical wine and cheese pairings.
Heymann suggests that proteins in the cheese may bind to flavour molecules in the wine, or that fat from the cheese may coat the mouth, deadening the tasters' perception of the wines' flavours. The paper will appear online in March in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture. New Scientist
Next time you are organising a cheese and wine party, don't waste your money on quality wine. Cheese masks the subtle flavours that mark out a good wine, so your guests won't be able to tell that you are serving them cheap stuff.
Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann of the University of California, Davis, presented trained wine tasters with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavours and aromas in each wine both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses.
They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including berry and oak flavours, sourness and astringency. Only butter aroma was enhanced by cheese, and that is probably because cheese itself contains the molecule responsible for a buttery wine aroma, Heymann says. Strong cheeses suppressed flavours more than milder cheeses, but flavours of all wines were suppressed. In other words, there are no magical wine and cheese pairings.
Heymann suggests that proteins in the cheese may bind to flavour molecules in the wine, or that fat from the cheese may coat the mouth, deadening the tasters' perception of the wines' flavours. The paper will appear online in March in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture. New Scientist
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Date: 2006-01-23 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 06:29 am (UTC)There's plenty of cheese and wine combos that don't work well -- but there are also very classic pairings that do. (Manchego & Sancerre rocks. Bethca this combo wasn't tested). Big wines and big cheeses -- not so much.
I'd really have to see the report, but I have much less faith in UC Davis than say, the Slow Food people. They tested 8 cheeses and 4 varieties of wine -- there's probably several hundred varieties of cheeses, and at least 100 varieties of wine. Not very comprehensive.
For the record -- even when I've eaten the stinkiest cheese -- I can tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. Which, more often than you might think, isn't about how much the wine costs.