What cheese would you use to coax a bear out of the woods?

Camembert!!

     Now that that necessary evil is out of the way, let's get on to the wine and cheese tasting...yum. My friend Miles and I split up the jobs of getting the cheese and the wine for this particular tasting and I was in charge of cheese. Being a cheese enthusiast, I was very much up for this task. I explored the cheese section of "gucci" Kroger and picked three delicious sounding fromages while my friend was finding us some various wines to sample.

Miles posing while tasting the parmesan
 and pinot grigio

   
     Our first pairing was parmigiano reggiano with the Californian Bota Box pinot grigio. The parmesan has quite a strong nutty flavor with a salty bite. It wasn't the worst pair for the wine but it definitely wasn't the best. The wine was fruity and light with a sweet honey taste. One of the things I love most about parmesan is it's strength of flavor and the wine, unfortunately,  washed away that intense bite. I think a much better pairing would be a much more dry and acidic wine that compliments the tart cheese.

The blue cheese and moscato

     We then moved to another sweet wine with Sutter Homes moscato. This wine had flavors of peaches and figs and tasted like summer in a glass. The cheese I had chosen was a tangy, salty blue cheese. It is classified, methinks, as a "stinky" cheese but it was deliciously creamy and little bit smokey. This was my favorite pairing of the evening because the tanginess of the cheese harmonized beautifully with the sweet wine. I already love the paring of blue cheese with fresh figs as a summer snack and the figgy-ness of this wine was a delighful balance to the cheese without overpowering it.

The camembert and pinot noir

     The last cheese was a camembert, no doubt inspired by my time in France. It's stinky and rich and creamy and amazing (<- what a totally unbiased opinion). It's a very strong cheese and I much prefer it to be showcased and merely highlighted by the wine I'm eating it with. Unfortunately the wine my dear friend had chosen had not accomplished that for me. The Original Dark Horse 2015 pinot noir that we paired with it was very jammy with dark berry flavors and had a warm spice to it when tasted alone. It really competed with the stinky, almost moldy, strength of the cheese. Again, I would have preferred a drier and perhaps earthy wine to pair this cheese with. Until my next awful food pun...santé!