Schlepping Old Wine Baggage

Matt Kramer
Posted: November 7, 2002

What is it about wine lore that, like dust balls under the bed, causes all sorts of musty, outmoded notions to accumulate? Take the old prescription that cheese is best with red wine. We've all heard it. And, yes, certain cheeses, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano, really do taste best with red wines.

But the old dictum about red wine with cheese was unbending. The famous Paris cheese merchant Pierre Androu't in his book Guide du Fromage (1973) states flatly: "Cheese is eaten with red wine, pure and simple." He was echoing generations of French gourmands.

Yet nothing could be more outdated. Experience reveals that white wines, with their flavor transparency, mineraliness and crisp acidity, better accompany many more cheeses than most reds do.

So how did this old prescription get started?

Until recently, most Europeans disdained white wine. I recall an Italian wine-producer dismissing white wine as "good for nothing except getting out red wine stains." Wine was red. It was as simple as that.

Indeed, many districts now famous for white wines once grew only red grapes. Take Sancerre, for example. Prior to World War I, if you asked for Sancerre, you got a red. It was Pinot Noir. Today, of course, Sancerre means white, made from Sauvignon Blanc. A red Sancerre is now a rarity.

Also, white wines were once much less stable than reds. By nature, they lack red wine's protective tannins, and, previously, they had a harder time resisting the pitfalls of poor winemaking or storage. Whites oxidized quickly and didn't ship well.

So it's no wonder that the gourmets of the time didn't bother to explore white-wine matches with cheese. The wines mostly weren't worth it.

But whites aren't the only wines that changed. The red wines that cheese lovers once enjoyed aren't the red wines we drink today. Not only are today's reds richer and bolder, but we drink them far younger than anything cheese fanciers would once have paired with their cheese plate.

Back when the "red wine with cheese" dictum was universally accepted, wine lovers wouldn't dream of drinking a red wine that didn't have at least 20 years of age on it. Many red Bordeaux didn't even appear on the market until a decade after the vintage. And good merchants would often cellar them for yet another 10 years.

Such aged red wines are more delicately fruity and consequently more deferential to cheese. So when they said "red wine with cheese" they were really thinking of a very different red wine than we drink today.

This same divergence from past tastes can be seen with, say, the choice of wine for oysters. A century ago, in France the wine for oysters was Sauternes. Today it's something light, crisp and very dry such as Muscadet or Alsatian Riesling.

I've tried Sauternes with oysters in America and, at least to my palate, it doesn't work. Why not? Because our oysters are different. American oysters are nowhere near as metallic-tasting as France's fabled Belons. The taste setup between oyster and wine is different.

Above all, it's a matter of the taste of your time. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, richness of all sorts was expected. I suspect that they particularly liked the plushness of Sauternes with the famously (and to some, objectionably) pillowy texture of oysters.

In this, we've lost something, namely a greater awareness of texture. Think of all those mainstay sauces of yesteryear's table: hollandaise, béarnaise and that all-time winner, sauce mousseline, a hollandaise that had lightly whipped cream incorporated into it. Now, that's texture. Can you imagine drinking a thin-bodied wine with that?

This is why so many of the white wines (and even some reds) preferred in that era were, by today's standards, relatively sweet. Really, these wines are better described as "rich" rather than sweet. Besides, many of them were drunk after 10 or 20 years of aging, when their sweetness had mellowed. Wines we think of today as conventionally dry -- Vouvray, Savennières, Champagne and even the odd white Burgundy or white Rhône -- were a little or a lot sweet.

Did those old wine lovers know something we don't know today? Absolutely. But we, too, know something. We know what works best for our food in our time -- just as they did for theirs.

Matt Kramer has contributed regularly to Wine Spectator since 1985.