Wine and Cheese Pairing #1

On Friday night, I did a wine and cheese pairing with my girlfriend, my roommate, and his girlfriend. It was a double date, and we all went through the wine and cheese pairings together. My girlfriend and I went to Kroger to get the cheese, and the vintage cellar to get all the wines. I bought 8 wines that night, and it cost me nearly $100, and my girlfriend also spent around that amount. It was an overall very fun night, my girlfriend loves cheese. We started our night with the wine and cheese pairings. Sadly, we didn't take a group photo, but we all did the tastings and learned a lot about what wines and cheeses we like.

We bought the wines at vintage cellar! It was cool to see the store in person after seeing it in the wine IQ quizzes. We even saw the guy who did the lecture with Boyer. As for the wine and cheese pairings, we did Chardonnay and Gruyere, Pinot Grigio, and Mozarella,  and Pinot Noir and Brie cheese. Specifically, it is a Mars and Venus Chardonnay 2017. We've been wanting to try a chardonnay for a while, since it is one of the most popular wines of all time. The Chardonnay was a product of Spain. As for the Pinot Grigio, it is a Santa Julia Pinot Grigio from 2019. It came from Mendoza, in Argentina. Our third drink is a Meiomi Pinot Noir, with a vintage year from 2017. This Pinot Noir comes from California, with a fraction of each coming from 3 different counties in California.

My girlfriend really likes cheese, so she selected some of her favorite cheeses and we paired wines based off of that. We ended up with Gruyere cheese, Mozarella cheese balls, and Brie cheese. Onto the actual pairings & tastings, I'll start with my notes on the Chardonnay. We used the wine wheel, but these are my notes, all of us detected things with variations overall, but also a lot of similarities with each other. For the Chardonnay, it was quite fresh. It was very herbaceous and it just pretty much smelled something like freshly cut grass. It was also sharp. When I first drank the wine, it really had a sharp and crisp taste that quickly went away after the first taste. I also wrote down that it was tangy/acidic. It had a slight sting and burn associated to it. Onto the pairings, the Chardonnay was initally sweeter than the cheese at first. However, once I chewed the cheese, the cheese itself became way sweeter and pulled through with flavors over time. There was a balance that reminded me of a seesaw. Overall, an enjoyable pairing that I would compare to a playground in my mouth, like a swing. The creaminess of the cheese came out once I was chewing more.

Onto the next pairing, which was the Santa Julia Pinot Grigio with the Mozarella cheese balls. I found the Pinot Grigio to be floral. It smelled like a flower, specifically roses. It was about medium floral smell strength. I also thought it to be quite fruity. I detected pears specifically, but also some others, like pineapple. Overall, a wine that wasn't very fruity, but one that you could detect a lot of varieties of fruit from. I found the flavor to be quite dry, it reminded me a bit of straw - like hay. It is a white wine with a medium body. The pinot grigio had way more flavor than the mozarella. The mozarella basically had no taste, and the pinot grigio was quite overpowering. Also, the pinot grigio tingles and the tongue, and definitely stings the nostril. Basically, the pinot grigio was the only thing I could taste, but the mozarella was a nice addition because I was quite hungry. Overall, the wine was too overpowering and I think this is not an ideal pairing.

For the next pairing, I had 2017 Meiomi Pinot Noir paired with the Brie cheese. As for the pinot noir, I detected that it was quite earthy, and reminded me of dust. This was our first red wine, and it was also a medium bodied wine. It tasted like soy sauce, and caramel. A bit salty, yet sugary at the same time. It had a lot of contrasting flavors, which all balanced each other. I found it to be nutty, like a walnut flavor, with the smell as well. The brie was extremely buttery, and the pinot noir brought out that butteriness. The pinot noir was a lot harder to finish than the other wines, because it wasn't nearly as sweet. I think it went well with the buttery brie cheese, but I would rather have had a sweet wine to enjoy the butteriness with the wine. The flavors were quite contrasting. I definitely tasted both, with the wine flavor being overpowering, while the brie's texture was overpowering. I think the pinot noir would've went better with a salty cheese that makes the mouth water, to contrast its somewhat drying effects.

Overall, my favorite wine and cheese pairing is definitely the chardonnay and the gruyere. They had the best balance out of the three, even though individually they wouldn't shine as bright as the other wines and cheese.