Cheese and wine? 19 January 2006

Radio newsman and winelover John Maytham saw the following item (from Sapa/AFP) ‘on the wires’ and sent it along, without direct comment (but we’ll make one, see end):

Vintage or vile, the taste is the same after a bite of cheese

If you are organising a wine-and-cheese party, don't waste your money on a fabulous wine: Chateau Rotgut is as good as Cheval Blanc. So say scientists, who have found that anyone who eats cheese will then find it impossible to distinguish the subtle tastes which are the hallmarks of a quality wine.

University of California at Davis researchers asked trained wine tasters to try four different varieties of wine, noting each for their flavours and aromas. The same assessment was carried out again after the tasters nibbled eight different cheeses. ‘They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including berry and oak flavours, sourness and astringency,’ the British weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.

‘Strong cheese suppressed flavours more than milder cheeses, but flavours of all wines were suppressed. In other words, there are no magical wine and cheese pairings.’ Fat from the cheese may be to blame because it could coat the mouth and tongue, deadening a good's wine subtle bouquet. Alternatively, certain proteins in the cheese may bind to certain molecules in the wine, preventing these molecules from activating taste buds, the scientists speculate. Only butter aroma in a wine was enhanced by cheese, and probably because cheese itself contains the same molecule responsible for a buttery wine savour.

The research, carried out by Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann, is published online in the March issue of the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.

In any case, when claiming that some tastes are suppressed (NB – they are not claimed to be destroyed) by cheese, there is no logic in moving on to say that ‘magical wine and cheese pairings’ are therefore impossible, although it would be logical to claim that it is not via an enhancement of the subtleties of the wine – perhaps it makes the cheese taste magical. Let them bring along their trained cheese tasters....

Given that a good deal of wine’s subtle pleasures come via the nose (smelling before, or through retronasal effects when the wine is in the mouth), coating the mouth and tongue is not going to affect the whole experience.

Years ago, the same type of researchers from Nestlé decided that they would analyse the wine to a point where they can reproduce the same molecules, and copy a Romanée-Conti 1937 or a Chapelle 1961.... And they were confident that this way they could as wel,l within a couple of years, have cheeses already having wine flavours... it was in 1972.

So even the best R&D labs, highly funded, could not understand the subtle interaction with food and wine, even not the action of the wine molecules themselves (even if in the film Mondovino a Californian firm seems to guarantee a Parker rating just through a technical analysis...).

Wine and food pairing is old continental stuff, and this may be a reason why the UK market is more prone to new world wines, which are social drinks wines, and not good pairing wines, as the classic Spanish, Italian, German or French wines.... But whoever has had the chance to eat a Coq au Chambertin with real Chambertin will understand that whatever the technical guy tells you, your pleasure is dictated by parameters that can barely be understood in the form of an equation.... it might be bad that we cannot drink a Biondi-Santi  1982 every day, but that's what makes it even more great and special....