Posted on 12/09/2007 10:44:00 PM PST by Cincinna
Earlier this year at Luc Salsedo, a charming little restaurant in the old city of Nice, our glasses of excellent Crozes-Hermitage 2004 were still about half full. Christine Salsedo, who owns the restaurant with her husband, Luc, the chef, suggested cheese. The selection included a St.-Marcellin, one of my favorites.
“Do you have any white wines by the glass?” I asked, and ordered a Château Trians, a Coteaux Varois, from the region.
Christine Salsedo seemed somewhat surprised. “Most of the time people drink red with cheese,” she said. “We’re French, so we definitely prefer red.”
Ever since I was taught, by none other than Aubert de Villaine, an owner of the esteemed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy, that good red wine is not flattered by cheese, I have been annoying restaurateurs and friends on the subject. With cheeses, de Villaine pours Le Montrachet, a buttery white Burgundy, never his top-of-the-line reds. “I do not want my great wines ruined by cheese,” he told me.
I was convinced. It made sense. Beyond the natural, regional affinity of goat cheeses of the Loire, like Selles-sur-Cher, with Pouilly-Fumé, generally speaking, the acidity of white wine better balances the fat in cheese. Red-wine tannins fight it, sometimes even tasting metallic. But while the dogma of white wine with fish has been largely discarded, the hidebound notion that only red wines go with cheese seems more difficult to dislodge.
At Luc Salsedo we conducted an experiment: Tasting the ripe cheeses, first with the unassuming little Provençal white, and then with our luxurious red Crozes-Hermitage, left no doubt. The white provided better balance and kept its character alongside the cheese.
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“Chateau Petrus? With the sweetbreads?”
No, I don’t think so. Too big, too expensive.
Perhaps a Chateau Greysac or a Calon Segur 96.
Dr. H. Lecter would disapprove.
Are you trying to say that he would prefer “a nice Chianti”?
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