On Thursday evening these week, I teamed up with Beatriz from Brix Wine Shop, and Terrence the Cheese Monger from Brix’s sister cheese shop, Barnyard, to put on the second of their Cheese School classes.  

The evening was titled “American Artisan Wine & Cheese”, and so, we focused on the night’s discussion and tastings on crafty little cheeses from the home turf, and paired them up with the Brooklyn Oenology wines.  From tasting these cheeses, you would think that they were from France or elsewhere in Europe with a much longer milk-fermenting history.

The class was also a casual lesson in cheese and wine pairing. There were some cheeses and wines purposefully matched together, but towards the end of the class we just started mixing and matching to just see what would happen. We started with a gem called “Bijou” (OK, OK, that means “jewel” in French – bad joke), which is a goat-milk soft-ripened little dot of cheese from Vermont Butter and Cheese Company.  I could have put the whole thing in my mouth and eaten it all up, and probably would have if I were not in polite company.  Alongside it we tried the Social Club White; while the cheese had a bit more pungency than the wine could stand up to, the wine’s acidity was a good match for the inner creaminess.

Next we had a thicker-rinded, mold-washed raw cow’s milk cheese called Constant Bliss from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont.  LIke the Bijou, it had a softer boundary underneath the rind and a denser center, but the rind was that much more powerful, and while not a double creme, it had the weight of one.  We matched that up with the Viognier, and, let me tell you, that Viognier keeps on surprising me.  It keeps on developing in the bottle; it’s a medium-bodied very light-colored wine, but don’t let that fool you; it’s flavors are robust.  It’s packed with peaches, pears, citrus, and passionfruit, and when it’s matched with a funkier cheese, those flavors stand out even more.

Viognier surprised us again with our fourth cheese, the Bayley Hazen Blue, also from Jasper Hill Farm.  As Terrence puts it, it is a Stilton-styled cheese (which is a funk-erific cheese if ever there was one!) that is “fudgy and dense” – again, the Viognier fruit really stood out.  The Bailey Hazen also sang here too; it’s pungent spiciness popped towards the end of the palate.  Before we tried this combo, we had tried the Bayley with Motley Cru.  I liked this pairing too, because the Motley Cru black pepper somewhat softened the blue in the cheese, and the wine’s red fruits were accented nicely.  The wine also had enough acidity to counterbalance the cheese’s fat content.  But, in this pairing, I felt the cheese took a back seat; it didn’t get to express itself as strongly with the Motley as it did with the Viognier.  This was counter-intuitive at first, since one might expect a stronger wine to match more evenly to a stronger cheese.  Upon discussing it, Terrence and I agreed that the Viognier pairing was akin to making that classic match of a dessert wine to a blue cheese, but that it was minus the sugar – somehow these two just worked together!

The most versatile cheese of the night was the third one, Thomasville Tomme, a buttery, semi-firm, cheddary raw cow’s milk cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy in Georgia.  It paired well with just about all of the wines (we didn’t get to try it with the Social Club White, ‘cuz we polished that off right at the start of the class…ahem.).  First we tried it with the Chardonnay, and it was great; the wine’s acidity again was a good match for the butter-fat of the cheese, and interestingly, the wine started out fruity in the beginning, then the cheese’s tangy flavors presented themselves, and then it finished with nuttiness from both the Chardonnay and the Tomme.  Cool!  After this point, once the fourth cheese arrived, I set out the Social Club Red and 2005 Merlot, and we just passed these around the table and did a big mix-and-match session of the reds and the remainder of the whites.  Both the Social Club Red and Merlot were good matches for the Tomme.  I really liked the Merlot with the second cheese too.

Terrence is as passionate about cheese as I am about wine – maybe even more so!  It’s fun to hear him talk about the history of American cheese making; he’s also very knowledgeable about  the history of the American dairy industry, and how the demise of small dairy farmers actually drove the artisanal cheese industry into existence. Once big agribusiness consolidated much of the dairy farms, smaller ones turned to cheese making to created an added-value product that would command a higher profit margin to bring more cash flow into the farm.  But, not having any recipes at hand, they turned to European recipes to get started, and then infused the recipes with their own twists to make a their own distinctive style. That, combined with American flora that feeds the herds, gives the American artisanal cheese industry its own identity.  Go visit Barnyard one day and hit up Terrence for a Brief History of Cheese, and you’ll hear a very interesting story.

Anyway, I’d like to thank Terrence and Beatriz for having me a their guest wine speaker, and to thank the attendees – we had a blast!  Below is the graduation photo:

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Graduation! Terrence the Cheese Monger is third from the left; I'm on the right.