Wine and Cheese Pairing 1

For wine and cheese pairing, our chosen wines and cheeses are --

Wine:

1. Pinot Noir - Barefoot

Semi-sweet and dry at the same time, moderate tannins, acidic, basically an all-around median on body. The taste is that of slightly berry and mushroom. The smell is tangy and acidic, overpowering.

2. Blueberry Fruitscato - Barefoot

This smells like blueberry, cherry, and strawberry all got put in a blender. The taste is fruity, and it is strangely harder to make out the individual berries from the taste as a opposed to the smell. It is acidic and semi-sweet, and I suspect the slight dryness will become much more prominent with some of the sweeter cheeses.

3. Moscato - Castello del Poggio

This wine gave off scents of peach and pear. It is slightly carbonated, and tastes like peach and pear, very consistent with the smell. It is moderately acidic, semi-sweet, and very light-bodied.

    Wine's paired and cut up cheese.

Cheese:

A. Vermont Creamery Goat Cheese

B. Murrays Cheese Buttermilk Blue

C. Murrays Barely Buzzed Cheddar

1A.

Fantastic combination as the wine compliments the cheese well. The wine is dry and tannic, while the cheese is sweet and practically gooey. These are like the yin and yang of wine and cheese.

1B.

The cheddar really sticks out as sharp when combined with the Pinor Noir. Since the main premise of the cheddar is that its slightly spicy and gives a kick, it does not blend well with the dry and acidic Pinot Noir.

1C.

There were a lot of flavors opened up with this combination. The cheese by itself is salty and stinky, and the wine is acidic and dry, but when combined, there is a smoothness from the cheese that gets unlocked. It's like a velvet glove was put on your tongue but with a rich, creamy feel.

2A.

I was surprised with how well this wine paired with the cheese. It is fruity and semi-sweet, so I thought that it would be overpowering with the sweet goat cheese, but the cheese revealed the dryness of the wine almost equivalent to how much extra sweet the wine added. Only downside is that the acidity of the wine interfered with the feel of the cheese.

2B.

Pleasantly surprised! The sweet of the blueberry was stymied by the spicy sharpness of the cheddar. This combination is the good balance of sweet and spicy that you look for in Asian food. The only thing is, the cheese itself would be balanced by itself, but the wine, sweet as it is, is not.

2C.

I feel like this combination brought out the worst of both worlds. The stinkiness of the cheese, contrary to what I expected (what else is new), became more prominent with the sweetness of the blueberry wine. At the same time, the wine appeared to be sweeter with that cheese. The wine's relatively light nature washed the stinky cheese all over my mouth and I couldn't focus on any other flavors because of it.

3A.

Hmm. Not the best combination. It is semi-sweet on top of sweet cheese, but honestly, that wasn't even the problem. The sweetness was not overwhelming, but the acidity of the wine clashed with the thickness of the cheese, and I did not even realize that the wine was dry until I combined it with the cheese. Both the wine and cheese are great by themselves, but not together.

3B. 

While this wine did not necessarily interfere with the cheese, it did not add anything to it either. It was like drinking Fanta with Sour Cream and Onion Lays chips. Both good by themselves and together, but they don't do much more for each other. The dryness of the wine and the sharpness of the cheddar stayed apart from each other on the palette.

3C.

As soon as you take a sip of this wine with the blue cheese, the stinkyness and general unpleasantness that comes with the blue cheese disappears, and is replaced by a creamy, rich, full cheese flavor. I couldn't place the exact flavor of the cheese, but it feels like a natural addition to the Moscato.