Matching food and wine: cheese and meat

Wondering about the theme of food and wine matching, @winebizkid and I found ourselves at the Bakerie in Manchester, where we tested a wine against three different cheeses and three different meats.

what we drank

Lagrein Cantina Tramin 2011 (Alto Adige, £29.95). Indigenous to the Alto Adige region (a heavily Germanic area also called Südtirol), Lagrein is a grape described by Oz Clarke in Grapes and Wines as having "a flavour of sour plums...bitter cherries, some black chocolate richness and deep, dark colour, but it is not very tannic," which sums up the wine we tasted well. Despite that lack of tannins, the chocolately dark fruits and its high acidity meant that it was strong enough to stand up to the cheeses and meats, and indeed overpowered some of them.

a table of wine, cheeses, and meat, with accoutrements

 

what we ate

three meats

chorizo - hot, spicy chorizo with a wine from Teutonic Italy: there was enough depth of flavour to the wine to hold up to the powerful tastes of chorizo cooked in a wine sauce, but it needed more of the oaky tannins of a Spanish wine to soak up the juicy, spicy meat.

lamb kofta - the high acidity of the wine added a needed juiciness to this Mediterranean lamb skewer; however, the minty lamb and the wine's chocolate fruit were an interesting but not quite convincing contrast.

serrano - the beautiful, soft, gorgeous flavours of the ham were lost in the dark fruits of the wine: both fantastic food and drink, but to be tried separately. (This is where I started eulogising about sherry, and how fino would be a perfect partner to this ham.)

three cheeses

lancashire - this was my favourite of the cheeses: soft and crumbly with a dry, salty finish. The wine added acidity and fruitiness to the cheese, but the cheese's subtle finish ended up being dominated by the wine. This is a cheese that would go well with the mature, red fruit flavours of a Burgundy Pinot Noir.

halloumi - with halloumi, the cheese squeaks in the mouth, pops, and then disappears. It's great, but a unique sensation. Tasting it with the wine was something similar: an immediate satsifaction followed by confusion at the competing flavours.

smoked cheddar - such a smoky cheese can dominate a wine that lacks body or intensity, but the Lagrein perfectly complemented the cheese's smokiness with its earthy fruitiness. This was a wine and cheese match that just kept on giving, demonstrating that a food and a wine from different parts of Europe can have attributes that work very well together.

smoked cheddar and Lagrein: a perfect pairing

overall

The wine, made from the Lagrein grape, high in acidity, relatively low in tannin, went better with the cheeses than the meat, yet it was the cheese with the strongest flavour that it worked best with, and one that wasn't a regional pairing. This showed the purpose, and fun, of experimentation: finding out which foods and wines unexpectedly go together, in this case English smoked cheddar and Alto Adige Lagrein. Of course, the experiment would have been more complete if we had tried more wines, but there were only two of us...