The Key to Pairing Wine and Cheese

Learn the tricks of the trade

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to match wines with cheese. The funny thing is I never thought about cheeses, just cheese. I recently asked my friend and Snooth contributor Levi Dalton a similar question about pairing wine and cheese and his answer, while so amazingly obvious, surprised me. Levi is a sommelier in New York and as such he is often asked to pair wines with cheese. With very few exceptions, Arpege in France was his example, cheese in a restaurant means a cheese plate, and pairing wines with an assortment of cheeses changes the equation entirely. In truth, that’s probably what most people mean when they ask about cheese and wine pairings: not a specific recommendation for a particular cheese, but rather a wine that is flexible enough to pair with many...