On Wednesday, September 17th, fans of wine, beer and cheese met at Cork and Bottle to settle an argument: Which pairs better with cheese? Wine or beer? Conventional thinking would say that wine of course would be the winner.. There’s food and wine magazines, entire tomes written on the pairing, and shops dedicated to just the two products. But if you think about it, wine and cheese are often a catastrophe! While wine and cheese can get along from time to time, they don’t really go well together. Wine has enough acid as to block delicate flavors in cheese, and cheese has enough fat to block delicate flavors in wine. A bad or cheap wine can be helped out by cheese for this very reason; it blunts taste.
So how does beer work any better? The trifecta of low acidity, wider flavor gamut, and carbonation make it the perfect pairing for anything high in fat and delicate in flavor. To me, it’s the carbonation that makes beer win everytime… while your taste buds get bogged down by the fats in cheese, the bubbles in beer can break that up, while wine simply floats on top, and nukes any available taste bud left. This isn’t to say that there’s no such thing as a good wine and cheese pairing, nor is every beer and cheese pairing an outright winner. But to me, most of the time, the body and flavor of beer just works better with cheese.
Surprisingly, wine guy Jon Smith of Cork and Bottle (host of the event) started his introduction with this very concession and if that wasn’t enough, Richard Sutton of St. James Cheese further backed up beer’s often superiority in this pairing. At this point I realized that the tasting was going to be less of a showdown, and more of an eye opener. Everyone knows about the wine and cheese pairing, but how many people would wise up to good beer by the end of the night? (more…)
Thu, Oct 23, 2008
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