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Cheese Pairing

Wine with French cheese is a good gastronomical experience. You can hold wine parties and serve French cheese to friends and experience something different for the taste buds. Sitting back, talking about the past while holding a glass of wine with authentic French cheese shows sophistication and knowledge about your food.

But you don’t just serve any French cheese with any wine. Any French will tell you that there’s always a perfect wine for a specific brand and type of cheese. Read on and see how to combine French cheese and wine. With proper combination, you’ll have the good one-two punch for your taste buds.

In general, red wine is always paired with French cheese, but for those with slightly different taste buds prefers their French cheese and white wine. In fact, almost 70% of French cheeses can be paired with white wine.

The idea of pairing most French cheese with red wine is from the fact that most French cheeses that are served at parties already have that strong flavor. White wine’s flavor is not that strong compared to the red wine. For the best pairing, you need to have a combination that will be stronger than the other in terms of flavor. From this point, your French cheeses should not over power your wine. Red wine doesn’t cancel out the flavor of strong French cheeses. Instead you’ll have a strong blend of the drink and French cheeses.

Here’s something more specific. When you order cheese for your wine, make sure that your wine is aged enough to be strong. Most of the cheap red wines are not strong enough to complement the aged French cheeses like camembert.  Red Bordeaux wine or Beaujolais are perfect with this type of wine. Brie de Meaux will also have Bordeaux and Burgundy as a perfect combination. Blue cheese Bleu d'Auvergne will require the very strong Cahors Côtes du Rhône to have the perfect flavor.

As we have said there are French cheeses that are perfect with white wine. White wine may not have that stronger taste compared to red wine but they are just perfect for French goat cheeses. The white Loire wine is perfect for almost known forms of French goat cheeses. Chevre, Crottin de Chavignol and Chabichou du Poitou are the goat cheese that will be complemented with a white wine. White wine can even go as far as using it when we are served by more than one type of cheese. However, to have a better experience of white wines, you have to go from soft cheese to hard or from the mild to pungent types of cheese. Red wine will just complement the other half but it will eliminate the flavor or even could go against the flavors of other French cheeses.

So when you go out or host a wine party, make sure you have the variety of French cheeses to complement the great wines that you serve. A perfect combination of wines and cheese is not really that expensive but it’s still classy.

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