Wine and cheese, on the rocks

There is an old saying about wine... buy with apples, sell with cheese. Meaning that if a wine tastes good after having an apple (which can easily kill a wine's flavor with its malic acid), you have a keeper, whereas cheese is very flattering to wine and will enhance the flavors.

UC Davis is challenging that theory, reporting that cheese doesn't really go with wine all that well, after all. This is kind of non-news in that it comes down, again, to "eat and drink what you like," but at the same time, there is some pretty damning evidence that cheese not only reduces a lot of unpleasant wine characteristics, it also muffles a lot of the good characteristics. And it's all in our heads, probably.

The study took a bunch of people and trained them in a common wine language, then had them taste wines and rate them on certain points (at least twice, in varying orders). Later on the participants had the wine with the various cheeses and rated the wines' characteristics once again. In each case, even with milder cheeses, the wines suffered from muted characteristics as the tasters experienced them. The study explains that decreased astringency is expected (the layer of fat between your taste buds and the wine will dull that) but that the diminished perception of oak or fruit can't really be explained well. It could be expectation (I know that if you give someone two glasses with the same wine in each, and announce that they are different wines, the person will often come up with differences that are not there), it could be something else.

I think the study was about as logical as it could be, but it's all so subjective, this tasting thing, that I don't know how you can do a foolproof experiment. Also, wine and cheese pairing is subjective on top of that... some people love blue cheese with Cabernet Sauvignon, some hate it. I guess the study tried to get beyond liking or hating and delve into specific points, so it will be interesting to see if more investigation goes into this.

I also wonder if any other studies have been done, studies about fish and tartar sauce, or french fries and ketchup. It makes you ask why we eat things with other things. Does it really matter that cheese doesn't enhance wine, if we just enjoy having them together?

Comments

[Kieca]

I bet the woman running the experiment was probably trying to keep it as simple as possible, to start off (as you point out, there are a lot of variables at hand). Trying to get twenty people well-versed and (even harder) in agreement on the flavors/aromas of wine is no small thing. I took a wine tasting class earlier this year and the different approaches and flavors people picked up in the wines were many. And I know that what most people think of as "hazelnut" always strikes me as "plastic", and I sometimes just say "hazelnut" since I have made that connection and people don't look at me funny like they would if I say "plastic". It took me a while, though.

Now this is making me wonder more why this is such a big deal, given that a lot of your sense of taste is actually your sense of smell, and that if you are tasting wine you use your retronasal passages a lot, and you certainly don't have cheese jammed into those! I don't know what percentage of taste is actually on the tongue, but other than the general sweet/sour/salty/bitter/umami thing, you might not get a lot right off the tongue. But I don't know for sure or anything.

I also have an aversion to mixing booze and dairy (I think White Russians are the devil, among other things, and keep all that kahlua crap away from me, too), but I do like cheese and wine. I think of wine as a food drink, not like cocktails, and will drink wine with pasta in cream sauce or something along those lines.

A chemistry PhD student I once lived with told me that the same enzymatic process that breaks down dairy works in reverse to break down alcohol (I probably way oversimplified that, I know) and it always seems wrong to me to put my enzymes under that much stress and confusion by giving them both. Well except for the cheese and the wine, of course!

[Jack]

Perhaps I should have clicked the link, first. (Or read yesteday's SF Chronicle Wine section!)
Interesting: no white wines or dessert wines tested. No light-bodied Beaujolais? And, were the wines all Californian?

In a nutshell, cheese mutes wine flavors; serve less balanced wines (and probably less expensive) with cheese.

[Jack]

Wine pairing? Cheese pairing? Perhaps they're really saying (but can't make that LEAP) is that dairy isn't a great match with wine. Sounds kind of gross, put that way - do you want to pair milk with wine? Butter with wine? Whip cream with wine? Oh, but cheese is the one?!? Wait, was it industrial cheese, Tallegio or Red Hawk? Were the cheeses served at proper ripeness and temperature? Were the wines high alcohol wines like a Turley zin?

Generalization: I can sure see the French, who look at wine as a beverage, having there after main course Cheese course with some cheap wine - a wine that's too acidic, astringent or tannic - and that the cheese has the desired effect on it - muting the out-of-balance wine (making it more pleasant).

I agree, too, that taste is so personal; who the heck loves the same cheeses, much less what they are paired with?