Enlightened ways to bring wine and cheese into greater harmony.

{ FOOD&WINE }

Wine, of course, contains alcohol – but if buzz is all you seek, there are cheaper options. We make such a fuss about wine because, properly chosen, it becomes as much a part of the meal as the plate, the cook, or the garlic.

Just as a BLT requires mayo to be complete, and sushi needs wasabi, a nicely cooked piece of red meat just isn’t as nicely cooked a piece of red meat without a sip of red wine swirling around your mouth along with it. The wine excavates your greasy taste buds from beneath the layers of melted fat, spanking and caressing the nerve cells in your mouth with their acidic goodness. The meat helps you fully experience the wine, which helps you fully enjoy the meat. (Beware, this mutual improvement can become a self-feeding chain reaction, leaving you drunk and bloated.)

But not all pairings are as foolproof as bloody meat with blood-red wine. The pairing of wine and cheese can be the stuff of confusion, mystique, and disagreement – in certain Northern California suburbs, a psychotherapist specializing in post-cocktail-party-planning stress disorder could do well. There is science to it, there is art, but ultimately it’s a personal alchemy. Nonetheless, here are some rules of thumb – grounded in some kind of reality, scientific or otherwise – to help demystify this tricky task:

Acid likes fat. Whether it’s lemon butter, oil and vinegar, tomato and mayo, wine and meat, or wine and cheese, when acid and fat converge in your mouth, something is created that equals more than the sum of its parts.

Acid likes acid. A cheese of high acid content – goat cheeses are generally very acidic – demands pairing with a wine of similarly high acidity, like a Sauvignon Blanc.

Cheese beats tannins. One of the main reasons cheese and wine go together – beyond the acid/fat dance – is that cheese can mask the taste of bad, or underaged, wine. Tannins are plant-based molecules derived from grape skins, seeds and stems. Over time, these tannins break down and become part of the wine’s unique and complex terroir. But many under-aged wines can have higher tannin concentrations than desired. The fat in the cheese protects your mouth from the astringent tannins.

Cheese deserves buttery stuff. And it turns out that cheese masks more than just tannins. According to New Scientist, trained wine tasters were presented with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavors and aromas in each wine – both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses. They found that cheese suppressed berry and oak flavors, as well as sourness and astringency – aka: nearly everything. Only butter aroma was enhanced by cheese.

In my mouth, fatty things taste good with wine. And there are snobs, meanwhile, who swear that a good cheese will taste better with a fine wine than a cheap one, and vice-versa.

To find out where you stand, start with a good cheese, say, a Saint Nectaire, and pair it with some cheap Cabernet, and then a nice Bordeaux Cru Bourgeois. And see what happens.