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Wine With Goat Cheese
by Paul Lukacs and Marguerite Thomas
Though Part One in our series of 'Wine With' features in which we are pairing different wines with different cheeses (first published on August 7th) yielded many successful matches, this second set of pairings proved more problematic. We tried five goat cheeses, ranging from young and fresh to dry and aged. No wine worked well with all of them. And to our surprise, the freshest cheese turned out to be the most difficult one to find a suitable wine partner.
Almost every wine we tried worked when we experimented a month or so ago with hard cheeses. So we shoudn't have been surprised that the hardest--because most aged--goat cheese on our plate this time (a Capra Sarda from Sardinia) proved the most adaptable and versatile with the wines we opened. No matter red or white, all but the lightest, thinnest wines held their own with it. In fact, we found that the firmer the goat cheese, the friendlier the match.
At the other end of the spectrum, though, the fresh creamy chèvre we tried (a Valencay from central France) didn't seem to mesh with many wines. We expected a Sancerre to shine with it since we know from past experience that Sancerre and the Loire's traditional Crottin de Chavignol goat cheese is one of the great, classic marriages of food and wine. But in this instance, the Sancerre we opened seemed dull and non-descript. (To be fair, we may have had a bad bottle. It wasn't corked, but certainly lacked pizzazz.) The oak in a Chardonnay from California seemed oppressive. The Golden State Sauvignon Blanc we're recommending below received mixed reviews from our panel of fours tasters, with three of us giving it a thumbs up, while the lone skeptic in our midst felt it did not really add anything to most of the cheeses except the Humboldt Fog (with which he thought it showed exceptionally well).
The problem with the soft, fresh goat cheeses seemed to be that most wines were too heavy for it, robbing it of lift, while lighter wines (a dry Tuscan white blend, for example) seemed too thin and watery. By contrast, the advantage of the harder cheeses we tried came from their almost waxy texture against which many different wines showed well.
Conventional wisdom seems to say that goat cheeses call for white wines, but except for the freshest (and again most difficult to match) cheeses, we found that reds worked as well if not better. The best reds all shared one significant feature - a soft, supple mouth feel, and an absence of astringent tannins. In fact, whether red or white, the best wines with these cheeses were those that felt the most supple. Texture, then, proved as important as flavor.
We purchased all of the cheeses for this tasting from the incomparable Murray's Cheese shop in Manhattan (we go to the branch in Grand Central Terminal). For the next installment in our 'Wine With' cheese series, we're going to try wines with soft, washed-rind cheeses. Look for it in this space in early October.
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Bonterra, Mendocino/Lake County (California) Viognier 2006
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$15 |
This pretty Viognier has the winning combination of delicacy plus body to stand up to even the more robust, aged cheeses. Like most of the wines that were well-suited to the cheeses in our sampling, this one has a suggestion of sweet fruitiness that harmonizes with the bite of acidity that characterizes many goats' milk fromages.
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Casa de la Ermita,Jumilla (Spain)Crianza 2003
(Imported by Opici Imports)
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$16 |
On this wine we all four agreed: it was our across-the-board favorite with almost all the cheeses. Soft and supple, it still had enough bounce to enhance the flavors of even the most complex cheeses. Although a tad too robust for the most delicate of the chèvres, it was the one wine in our lineup that had all the qualities that make for a successful goat cheese match: good body, without being heavy; soft, almost imperceptible tannins; a suggestion of fruitiness but not over-ripeness; and a lively, rather than concentrated, character.
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Frei Brothers, Russian River Valley (California) Syrah Reserve 2005
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$24 |
The principal reason red wines are generally less congenial with goat cheese than whites is that chèvre is considerably lower in fat than cow's milk cheese--and fat is the great buffer for tannins (hence the perfect partnership of red wine and red meat). But this Syrah is a terrific example
of why a nicely structured, well balanced red wine, with non-aggressive tannins, can go beautifully with good goat cheese. While we certainly wouldn't recommend it with extremely mild, fresh cheese, all the more robustly flavored chèvres in our tasting (the mouthcoating, tangy Tarentais from France's Savoie region, for example), and the creamier ones (such as the sublimely smooth and complex Cypress Humbolt Fog from California) were delicious with the wine.
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Merryvale, Napa Valley (California) Sauvignon Blanc 'Starmont' 2006
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$18 |
Three of us ranked this Sauvignon Blanc the best of the white wines, while the fourth thought it was a snooze-perfectly fine, but not particularly exciting with most of the chèvres. What the rest of us liked about it was the way its vivaciousness and bright grassiness interacted with the freshness and clean, pure flavors inherent in the lighter, younger cheeses.
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Raymond, Napa Valley (California)Merlot Reserve 2004
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$24
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At first sip this Merlot seemed too big and assertive to accommodate the delicate nuances and textures of most goat cheeses, but in the end we all agreed that its plush texture and sweet, rich fruity/chocolaty flavors were just restrained enough to make it a surprisingly good fit.
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