Cheese & Wine Pairing: a Primer on Matching Wine with Cheese

Pairing wine with cheese is not as easy as it seems. Check out our guidelines and points about cheese below, and then remember to always do a test session with several wines and cheeses to make sure they work.

An easy guideline to use is to match the wine and cheese regions, body-weight or flavor profile. Or to do the opposite of body and flavors (fatty cheese with crisp acid). And keeping it local/regional also makes sense as the wine and cheese would share the same terroir. Or, getting cheeses from the region that the grape varieties are from is another pairing method.

There are so many ways to make this work!

Here are some finer points on cheese:

• Sheep’s milk has the most butterfat, followed by goat, cow, then water buffalo (the Asian buffalo used for mozzarella in Italy).
• The more fat in a cheese, the more acid needed in the wine.
• Orange-colored cheese comes from anato seeds, originally added to differentiate between regions or to mask the seasonal color of the cheese (summer cheese is better – and colored differently – than winter cheese).
• The strongest flavor of the cheese is near the rind, since cheeses age from the outside in.
• When you cut cheese, it’s polite to cut a wedge from the center out, like a pie. That way each person gets some of the most flavorful part and the creamiest part.
• Full-bodied reds are the hardest to pair with cheese and oakey, buttery Chardonnays are also some of the most difficult.