This week’s pairing features one of our most popular cheeses from our case. And if there’s one cheese to count on for a reliable pairing, it’s typically, the L’Amuse Brabander. Hand-selected from a cheese cooperative in the Brabant region of Southern Holland, by Betty and Martin Koster of Fromagerie L’Amuse, Brabander is a pasteurized goat milk gouda that most everyone favors. Through careful selection, and a unique method for aging, Brabander is dynamic in flavor, meanwhile delivering a melt-in-your-mouth, yet slightly crystalline paste. Reminiscent of a sea salt and cashew caramel ice cream, Brabander is aged for just about 6 months at slightly higher temperature and humidity than typical of most goudas. For this week’s selection, we’ve paired this gouda with a food-friendly rosé from the Savoie region of Southeastern France, made from the regional varietal, Jacquére. With notes of rusty late season strawberries, light body, mild effervescence, and the perfect acid, the rosé from Domaine Labbé provides ideal qualities needed for an effortless pairing.
Week 7: Feeling sheepish
2019 Amity Vineyards White Pinot Noir & Ossau-Iraty
For those of us who work in the food and beverage industry, tasting sessions are an important part of our work. They provide space for reinforcing what we know, and continually remind us of how much we still have yet to learn. As we search for successful pairings, sometimes we’re lucky and find success early on. Other times it can feel like we’re lost in the woods, struggling to find our way out. Our cheese selection for this week is, Ossau-Iraty, a raw sheep milk cheese from the Pyrenees Mountains of southwestern France. One of the oldest cheeses in the world, this cheese is made with the milk of select breeds of sheep that thrive on forage native to the rough terrain surrounding the foothills and mountain pastures of the Ossau Valley in Béarn and the Iraty Forest of the Northern Basque Country. With a high butterfat, salty paste, and a definitive animal quality, Ossau-Iraty leaves its mark on the palate. While we struggled to find a solid pairing early on, we eventually found Amity Vineyard’s 2019 White Pinot Noir, from the Willamette Valley of Oregon, to be a refreshing side-kick to the forward bite, and rich, fatty finish of this old-world cheese. With a floral note of orange blossom and a peachy acidity, this wine provides a welcomed balance to this traditional french cheese.
The Pairing Week 6: Time for Tomme
Donnhoff Riesling 2019 & Stony Pond Farm Swallow Tail Tomme
We are well into the second month of our Pairing Series, and eager to introduce you to some new selections. We’re also delighted by how well this program has been received thus far. But for this week, we’re gonna circle back and shine more light on one of the cheeses from our first week’s selections. In 2007, Tyler and Melanie Webb, of Stony Pond Farm in Fairfield, Vermont, began producing milk for the farmer-owned cooperative, Organic Valley. Then, in the summer 2019, they transitioned to making cave-aged farmstead cheese with the milk from their blended herd of pastured cows. Their cheeses have found a home in our case, and our team of cheesemongers has fallen in love with them. Our latest wheels of their Swallow Tail Tomme possess a rich and creamy paste, forward salinity, and the rustic character expected of a tomme-style cheese. With the slightest kiss from an earthy bitter note, we found this cheese to pair nicely, albeit differently from the first time around with Donnhoff’s 2019 Riesling. An off-dry, medium-body wine with subtle effervescence, this Riesling has the proper balance of rich fruit and acidity to make this pairing memorable.
The Pairing Week 5: Alpine Cheese
2016 Red Car Sonoma Coast Chardonnay 2016 & Uplands Cheese Company Pleasant Ridge Reserve
On a small farm just outside of Dodgeville, Wisconsin, one of the most highly regarded cheesemakers in the United States hones his craft. With pastured milk harvested from his closed herd of roughly 200 cows, Andy Hatch of Uplands Cheese Company makes only two cheeses, and this time around we’re focusing our attention on his award-winning Pleasant Ridge Reserve. An alpine style cheese inspired by Swiss Gruyere and French Beaufort, Pleasant Ridge is buttery rich, with a silky smooth paste, and flavors reminiscent of caramelized sugar and roasted hazelnuts. As much as we love to eat this cheese on its own, we’ve found a brilliant wine pairing from Red Car Winery, located along the West Sonoma Coast of California. This medium-body Chardonnay, aged on mostly neutral French oak, provides the perfect backbone of delicate tannins, sweet fruit, and balanced acidity to help deliver an enjoyable mouthfeel, and amplify the cheese’s flavor qualities.
The Pairing Week 4: Get Your Goat
2019 Blanchet Pouilly-Fumé & Bûche Sainte-Maure
For this week’s pairing, we’re focusing our attention on an area in central France known as the Loire Valley. With its show-stopping fields of sunflowers, abundant vineyards and fruit orchards, along with châteaux abound, the Loire River Valley provides the perfect terrain and climate for some of France’s most cherished goat cheeses and white wines. Across the Loire River from Sancerre, another prominent French wine district, the Blanchet family has been making Pouilly-Fumé for generations, continually aiming towards a greater level of ingenuity and sustainability. Made with old-vine Sauvignon Blanc grapes, their wine delivers a citrus forward, smoky nose, and a mineral character born from the flinty soil native to the upper Loire. As we tasted this wine along side the pasteurized goat’s milk, Bûche Sainte-Maure, produced in the same region, we appreciated how this medium-body, dry wine stood its own against the cheese’s grassy bite, and supple, semi-sweet yogurty paste. A perfect pairing of place.
The Pairing Week 3: We proceed to get funkier
2020 Vietti Moscato d’Asti & Meadow Creek Dairy Grayson
A number of cheeses we sell in our case are seasonal in production, meaning they are only produced during specific months of the year. One good example is Meadow Creek Dairy’s Grayson, a soft-ripened, washed rind cheese made from unpasteurized cow’s milk. With the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia in their backyard, Meadow Creek makes this farmstead cheese the old-fashioned, hard way. From raising a herd of hybrid Jersey cows that live and birth exclusively outdoors, to rotationally grazing, and only making cheese while the animals feed on fresh pasture, this farm follows the rhythm and pace of their land. Each March, soon after calving begins, milk starts to flow, and with it cheesemaking commences. Wheels are generally aged for between 2 and 4 months, the former tasting more mild, while age brings about a more meaty, smoky flavor and a creamier paste. This cheese screams for a beverage pairing that provides a balance of acidity and residual sugars, one like this Moscato d’Asti from Piedmont, Italy. With notes reminiscent of apricot and ginger, and a kind bit of fizz, we found this wine not only capable of standing up to this cheese, but complementary in both taste and mouthfeel. Like all cheeses, enjoy them at room temperature, and serve this wine chilled.
The Pairing Week 2: And We Take A Baby Step Towards the Funk
We’re moving away from the super safe confines of triple creme brie towards a brie with a bit more in the way of flavor. Here is Peter’s report on this week’s pairing:
2018 Marion Borgo Valpolicella & La Ferme de la Tremblaye Brie Fermier
This lighter bodied red wine, made from a combination of Rondinella and Corvina grapes, hails from the Veneto region of northeastern Italy. Borrowing equally of modern and traditional techniques, this Valpolicella leans earthy and musty in profile, offering hints of warm spice which balance a salty palate and compliment this hand-ladled, farmstead cow’s milk brie. Buttery vegetal notes within the cheese are tempered by layers of stone fruit and ripe red berries within the grapes. Produced on an organic farm located just outside Paris, and with milk from a single herd, eating this cheese brings to mind savory flavors of toasted garlic and roasted asparagus. The milk used in making this cheese first undergoes a low-temperature form of pasteurization, called thermization, which aims to reduce spoilage bacteria within the milk, meanwhile preserving key milk components responsible for the desired flavors expected of true french bries. This pairing doesn’t disappoint.
The Pairing Week 1: Start at the Beginning
We knew that we were going to start this project with a triple creme. Soft, creamy cheeses are some of the most commonly requested cheeses out of our case. Aged for weeks, rather than months or years, soft younger cheeses offer a clean expression of milk, and tend to pair relatively nicely with other foods and beverages. In the case of Brillat Savarin, a soft-ripened triple créme cheese from Normandy, France, the milk is enriched with cream early in the cheese making process, resulting in a texture within the finished cheese reminiscent of softened butter. These softer styles of cheese serve as a good reminder that producing great tasting cheese is a function of harvesting high quality milk. Here are some of our tasting notes from this week’s pairing.
2020 Gail Cellars “Doris” Dry Rosé & Brillat Savarin
Citrusy, with a bright level acidity, this rosé pairs well with the cheese’s high butterfat content. The saltiness of the cheese welcomes hints of red fruit from the grapes, similar to unripe strawberries. A thin, bloomy rind, and a luscious cream line underneath, help make this pairing a well-balanced combination of flavors and textures.
Sophia's "invisible" tomato sauce
‘Invisible’ Tomato Sauce
Invisible tomato sauce is the perfect pasta pairing when you crave warm summery nights. Bursting cherry tomatoes and melting anchovies give this pasta sauce tons of flavor. It’s perfect for actual summer nights too, since it only takes the time your pasta needs to cook. It’s fun to let the cherry tomatoes burst slowly on their own, but if you need them to hurry up a bit, you can add some pasta water to the sauté pan and cover.
Ingredients-
Pint Cherry tomatoes*
Olive Oil*
Linguine*
2-4 anchovy filets*
3 large garlic cloves*, chopped
Chili flakes to taste*
Optional-
Nutritional Yeast or Parmigiano-Reggiano*
* all available at France 44 Cheese Shop
Get you pasta water boiling on the stove. Put a high-walled sauté pan on medium heat and add a few glugs of olive oil, around 2 tbsp. Pour tomatoes into the pan and let sizzle and burst, around 10 minutes
Add your pasta to the boiling water. Once the tomatoes are ¾ of the way burst and most of the juices have started to run out, add your anchovy filets, garlic, and chili flakes. Mix so the anchovies melt, the garlic becomes fragrant, and the chili doesn’t burn. If the pan looks a little dry, add more olive oil or pasta water.
When your pasta is a minute from where you want it, pull it straight from the pot and add to the tomato sauce. Let the noodles finish cooking with the tomatoes. Stir frequently and add more pasta water as needed to emulsify. Once the sauce is shiny and clinging to the noodles, turn off the heat and plate. Taste for salt and spice.
With a dish like this, I don’t always want to weigh it down with dairy. On those days, I opt for nutritional yeast, one of my favorite garnishes with a nutty, savory flavor. On a rainy day like today, I went with Parmigiano-Reggiano for that distinct Parmy comfort.
The Pairing
Here our long time Minneapolis manager Peter introduces a brand new series we’re launching.
In case you haven’t heard, we’ve launched a new weekly wine and cheese pairing program here at France 44 called, “The Pairing!” Each week we’ll showcase a specific wine and cheese pairing, along with insights as to why we believe the pairings taste great.
With Easter right around the corner, we thought we’d kick things into gear with two great pairings at once! Here’s a brief recap of our tasting this past week.
2019 Donnoff Estate Riesling & Stony Pond Farm Swallow Tail Tomme -
What a great way to begin our brunch-time tasting meeting! The Riesling’s subtle sweetness balanced the rich, buttery, earthy flavors within this raw milk tomme. Tasting the cheese's rind drew out vegetal notes from the grape, pointing to the complexity of the wine, and its ability to pair with different cheeses.
2018 Calera Pinot Noir & Pitchfork Bandaged Cheddar -
Surprisingly fun, and very complimentary, these two tasted fantastic together, elevating one another to a new level. With a slightly higher ABV of around 14%, we knew this wine might be a challenge to pair with this cheese, but as it turned out, the wine’s intensity was tempered by the salty, umami, and mineral-like flavors expressed in the cheese. Kinda leaves you wanting more.
