Cheese and Wine Pairing

Red wine is the perfect partner to cheese. White wine can also be paired with 70% of French cheeses; a dry white or even a sweet white wine

Advice: Avoid too light a wine with your cheese

Keep it simple - an often made mistake is to serve too big a cheeseboard. You're better off serving one perfect cheese with a good wine than four or five varieties of cheese.

Remember that in general, the more a cheese is left to ripen, the stronger it will become and will probably dominate the flavor of the wine. Cheeses that are hard to match with wine are blue cheeses, smoked cheeses and those with strong aromas.

Blue Cheese

One of the great wine-cheese partnerships is Roquefort and Sauternes. The combination of honeyed sweetness and salty tang is perfect, but you can swap the Roquefort for any similar blue cheese and replace the Sauternes with a moelleux wine from the Loire, Bergerac or Jurançon.

As an alternative, try partnering a blue cheese with a full-bodied red such as Pomerol.

Soft Cheese

Soft cheeses such as Brie, Neufchâtel and Camembert can be accompanied by a light, fruity red like a Beaujolais or Loire (Saumur or Touraine). Soft cheeses also go well with soft, medium-bodied reds like Languedoc or Vins de Pays d'Oc.

Wines can be matched with soft cheeses according to the rind of the cheese - Cheeses with a washed rind such as Munster, Le Brin, Reblochon, Terroir, Chaumes and Tourée de l'Aubier can be enjoyed with full-bodied reds like Bourgogne, Pomerol, Saint-Emilion, and also whites from Alsace, such as Gewürztraminer and Muscat.

Cheeses with a natural rind such as Crottin de Chavignol go well with dry and fruity whites like Alsace, Anjou, Sancerre, and Pouilly-Fuissé and with rosés like Côtes du Rhône or Rosé d'Anjou.

Semi Hard Cheese

Another great wine-cheese partnership is Cantal or Raclette with dry whites like Mâcon Blanc, Jura or Savoie Wine or dry rosés like Rosé de Provence or light reds like Beaujolais.

Goat's Cheese

Arguably one of the best wine-cheese combinations is fresh goat's cheese paired with wines made with the Sauvignon Blanc grape variety - a great choice for those fashionable goat's cheese and char gilled vegetable dishes you find in smart restaurants. You could also try a Chardonnay from South Burgundy.

Make life easier

To make your life easier when pairing cheese with wine, choose from the Vins de Cépage range:

Goat's Cheeses — Sauvignon Blanc
Mild Cheeses — Gamay, Chenin
Medium Cheeses — Pinot Noir, Merlot
Strong Cheeses — Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah (Shiraz), Grenache

Above all - enjoy your choice of cheese and wine!