Pairing Artisan
Wine & Cheeses
From the Pacific Northwest

Pairing Beaux Freres Pinot noir
and Mystic Merlot
with the Best NW Cheeses

By Tami Parr

Wine and cheese are a classic combination – one of life’s great pleasures is a glass of good wine tasted alongside an artisan-made cheese. When you start to think about the nuts and bolts of actually choosing wines and cheeses to sample, however, the prospect can be complicated and a little overwhelming. How can you really know which wines and cheeses will go well together? The process is more art than science, though there are some time-honored guidelines that I’ve found prove mostly true:

Like With Like: Generally speaking, itÂ’s a good idea to pair like with like. For example, lighter whites will pair best with cheeses that are on the mild side of the spectrum, such as soft ripened (brie style) cheeses; deeper reds pair well with more aged, sharper cheeses like British cheddars and blue cheeses.

Stick with the Same Region: An old adage prescribes that wines go well with cheeses that originate from the same area, the reasoning being that both the animal and the fruit are products of the same terroir – the characteristics of land, climate and environment unique to a given area. The Pacific Northwest, home to many outstanding winemakers and cheesemakers, provides myriad opportunities to test this theory.

If it Tastes Good...: When tasting a good wine/cheese pairing, the flavors of wine and cheese will magically meld together, transforming the characteristics of both the wine and the cheese into a unique new, pleasing flavor profile. The combination will seem like a match made in heaven. When tasting a poor pairing, the cheese and wine flavors will clash or overpower one another and surprising bitter and/or astringent qualities will dominate. Believe me, you will know when this happens!

Experimenting is OK: Once youÂ’ve played a bit with the basics, toss the rules and experiment with what works for you. Wine and cheese pairings can be very palate-specific and what agrees with one person may not work universally.

Ultimately, the first step in pairing wine and cheese is simply to begin. Think of the process as an exploration without any real wrong or right answers. Along the way you will be privileged to taste a lot of great wine and cheese regardless of whether or not any particular wine pairs well with any particular cheese. Best of all, there are no penalties for mistakes or bad choices.

Pairings: the Best of the Bunch

To demonstrate how you might approach the task of pairing wine and cheese, I took two wines, a Beaux Freres 2005 Pinot Noir and a 2002 Mystic Merlot, along with a selection of artisan cheeses from the Pacific Northwest and experimented with a range of different tasting combinations. As I expected, these two full bodied reds tended to work best with sharper and more flavorful cheeses at the aged end of the spectrum, overwhelming my more mild and subtle sample choices such as the Willamette Valley Gouda and the Sally Jackson SheepÂ’s Milk cheese. I canÂ’t emphasize enough, however, that you should experiment with your own variations to see what flavors work best for you.

The Wines

Beaux Freres Pinot Noir 2005 Willamette Valley
Mystic 2002 Merlot

The Cheeses

Willamette Valley Cheese Co. Farmstead Brindisi
Willamette Valley Cheese Co. Gouda
Rivers Edge Chevre St. Olga
Ancient Heritage Dairy Hannah Bridge
BeecherÂ’s Handmade Cheese Flagship
Sally Jackson SheepÂ’s Milk Cheese
Rogue Creamery Smokey Blue
Rogue Creamery Crater Lake Blue
Rogue Creamery Rogue River Blue

Beaux Freres 2005 Pinot Noir Willamette Valley

This is a luscious, deeply fruity and cherry wine thatÂ’s velvety-smooth; though it started out a bit tight it mellowed considerably on the finish. The berry characteristics of this wine tended to favor cheeses with similar fruit or subtly sweet taste profiles. Below IÂ’ve detailed some of the standout pairings:

Rivers Edge Chevre St. Olga

Pat Morford makes outstanding cheeses from the milk of 50 or so Alpine goats on her farm in Logsden, Oregon (near Newport). Her St. Olga is a raw milk, washed-rind cheese that Pat washes weekly with Siletz Brewing Co.Â’s Oatmeal Cream Stout. The result is a creamy-smooth cheese thatÂ’s slightly tart and subtly tropical, with pleasant goat and barnyard notes.

The St. Olga was outstanding with the Beaux Freres, with the tangy goat flavors nicely complementing the oaky and licorice undertones of the wine. In addition, the textures worked well together, the smooth creaminess of the cheese melding with the velvetiness of the wine. I was left with lovely warm and mellow toasted nut flavors on the finish. Very warm and engaging.

Rogue Creamery Smokey Blue

Rogue Creamery has been making blue cheese in southern Oregon since 1935 but the Smokey Blue is a recent innovation. To make this cheese, David Gremmels and Cary Bryant take their flagship product, Oregon Blue, and smoke it for 16 hours over local hazelnut shells. The result is a remarkably engaging, mellow cheese with mildly smoky and carmel-blue flavors that complement without dominating each other.

Although you might think that the smokey blue flavors in the cheese might make for a difficult beverage selection, IÂ’ve actually found that Rogue Smokey Blue takes quite well to a variety of wines, and the Beaux Freres 2005 was yet another case in point. This wine brought out and highlighted the rich smoke flavors in the cheese and at the same time tempered those flavors with its berry and fruit, making for a very tasty alliance.

Willamette Valley Cheese Co. Farmstead Brindisi

Rod and Melissa Volbeda make a variety of wonderful cheeses from the milk of their herd of soft eyed Jersey cows just north of Salem, Oregon. The Brindisi is a fontina style cheese (‘Brindisi’ is Rod’s mother’s maiden name) that is available in a younger version aged around 4 months and an older version aged between 8 and 12 months; I sampled the more aged variety for this pairing. The Brindisi is a flavorful cheese with a concentrated, fruity aroma reminiscent of a good Parmigiano-Reggiano along with a slight tanginess and sharpness on the tongue. When sampling the more aged Brindisi you might notice a smattering of protein crystals in the cheese - these occur naturally as part of the aging process.

I found that the slight salty sharpness of the cheese paired nicely with the initial tannic ‘bite’ of this wine. At the same time, the inherently fruity characteristics of the Brindisi mingled very well with the Beaux Freres’ berry and cherry notes. Although the Pinot dominated initially, the wine-cheese combination eventually smoothed out. With such similar flavor profiles, I think this wine and cheese were meant to be together!

Mystic Merlot 2002

I found the flavors of the 2002 Mystic Merlot a bit mellower overall than the 2005 Beaux Freres. In general, the more savory coffee and licorice characteristics of this wine took easily to the savory flavors in the cheeses IÂ’d selected, making the 2002 Mystic Merlot quite a versatile pairing partner.

Willamette Valley Cheese Co. Farmstead Brindisi

The Mystic/Fontina amalgamation of flavors started out as a soft blending that had the effect of smoothing out both the wine and the cheese so that neither the wine nor the cheese overshadowed one another. I find that I keep coming back to describing the tasting experience as a pronounced and comforting balance of flavors, a pleasing harmony. These two make a good match.

Rivers Edge St. Olga

St. Olga turned out to be quite a versatile cheese, going very well with both the Beaux Freres Pinot and the Mystic Merlot. The Mystic mellowed and concentrated the goaty flavors of the cheese, while at the same time the cheese managed to brighten the wine, bringing out a liveliness I hadnÂ’t experienced when tasting the wine on its own.

BeecherÂ’s Flagship

Beecher’s Flagship is made in Seattle’s Pike Place Market at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese Shop. If you’ve visited, you’ve probably seen the cheesemakers hard at work around the cheese vat curdling milk, draining whey or stacking and draining curd (also known as ‘cheddaring’). Beecher’s Flagship, the result of those labors, is aged for about a year and is a very accessible cheddar-style cheese that’s salty and semi-sharp with cheddary and swiss notes.

While the Flagship positively fell apart against the Beaux Freres, it took to the Mystic quite well. The wine flavors accentuated the sharp, cheddary qualities of the Flagship and the FlagshipÂ’s cheddar flavors simultaneously drew out chocolatey and licorice undertones in the wine. This turned out to be an outstanding union of wine and cheese, one of the best of the bunch.

Rogue Creamery Crater Lake Blue

Rogue Creamer’s Crater Lake Blue is not for the faint of heart. It’s the most intense of Rogue’s blues, sharply blue and saltier than Rogue’s other blue cheese styles. Given these characteristics, you might think that it wouldn’t work well with any wine at all – in fact, some people have difficulty pairing any blue cheese with wine, preferring port or sherry instead.

I enjoy red wine and blue cheese together, and for me the Mystic worked very well with the Crater Lake. The wine cut the sharp intensity of the blue down a comfortable notch while concentrating its essential flavors. At the same time, the wine positively blossomed with a fruitiness that it hadnÂ’t seemed to initially possess. This was an intriguing pairing that brought out unexpected, unique flavors from both the wine and the cheese.

Ancient Heritage Hannah Bridge

Kathy and Paul Obringer of Ancient Heritage Dairy in Scio, Oregon began making and selling their outstanding sheep’s and cow’s milk cheeses in 2006. The Hannah Bridge is a cow/sheep’s milk combination which has a slightly sharp, herby-sweet flavor and a pretty yellow straw color. One of the best characteristics of the sample I had was a slight dill flavor – perhaps the cows or sheep had been grazing near some dill before they gave the milk for this cheese!

The Mystic paired very nicely with the Hannah Bridge, complementing the herby flavors while mellowing them and bringing out a sharpness and tanginess of the cheese. In this pair, the wine tended toward the background, working as a catalyst to bring out a wonderful complexity inherent in the cheese. Highly recommended.

One additional wine and cheese pairing note: remember that wine and cheese are seasonal products. A pairing between wine and artisan-made cheese that works today may seem different the next time you try it. This is due to the wine’s aging process and/or variations in grazing conditions that produce slightly different characteristics in milk that makes cheese. As you become more experienced in pairing you will learn to appreciate and even anticipate these kinds of subtle variations – these are the things that make the tasting process so interesting and intriguing. As I said earlier, if you approach wine and cheese pairing with a sense of adventure and exploration, you will have a very pleasant journey indeed.

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Tami Parr is the author of the website Pacific Northwest Cheese Project (http://pnwcheese.typepad.com), an online resource for information on Pacific Northwest artisan cheese and cheesemakers. She lives in Portland.