The German Wine Society held its annual meeting on February 19 at the Eureka Club (which, oddly enough, is the club owned and operated by Alcoholics Anonymous. Are they trying to tell us something?).
The annual meeting always features wine-tasting, of course, but it doesn’t offer a full meal like the usual GWS events do. Instead, the executive usually tries to come up with something a bit different, and this year, besides the AA connection, they came up with a wine and cheese tasting.
They matched some usual and unusual German wines with an equally interesting selection of cheeses from the Bulk Cheese Warehouse, which recently opened in Regina.
The registration wine was a Langenbach Binger St. Rochuskapelle 2000 Kabinett from the Rheinhessen. We rated it a very typical Kabinett Riesling: nothing special. It was fine, but we wouldn’t go out of our way to buy it again.
The first cheese came after the annual meeting. It was Huntsman Cheddar, a hard cheese consisting of Stilton sandwiched between Cheddar Double Gloucester. It’s supposed to go well with beer, but we had it with a German red (yes, they do exist): Martinshof Regent Rotwein 2000, from the Pfalz region. Regent, we were informed, is a relatively new type of grape, created less than 40 years ago and only approved as a varietal in 1994. One of its best features is that it is fungus-resistant. It's described as having aromas of black cherry and black currant and a not-very astringent finish, and that sounded about right: we found it a very young-tasting wine, very fruity, with a nice freshness to it.
The second cheese was German Butter Cheese, fresh, creamy, with a hint of parmesan. It was paired with Martinshof Gewurztraminer Spatlese 2001, which reminded us once again of why we enjoy German Gewurztraminers so much, and emphasized our disappointment with a Canadian Gewurztraminer we tried just a few days before (but haven’t blogged yet). The bouquet was not immediately appealing, having something of a diesel exhaust smell, but the flavor was very distinctive and very full-bodied. This late-harvest wine was sweet, spicy and rich, with notes of apricot and lychee.
Cheese number three was Cambonzola. Developed in Germany in the 1970s, this cheese features streaks of gorgonzola, a mild blue cheese, in camembert. One of the odder wines of the night accompanied it: Martinshof Chardonnay Spatlese 2003. We were intrigued by the use of the chardonnay grape, but we weren’t big fans of the wine. It didn’t have much bouquet and a kind of odd flavor—Margaret Anne described it as sooty or smoky. She didn’t like it at all; Ed didn’t mind it as much. It went fairly well with the cheese, but several people reported the Gewurztraminer was an even better match.
Number four was Cave-Aged Gruyere. The smell, and the fact it was cave-aged (for a minimum of five years, we were told), reminded Ed of a story told by a Spanish cheesemaker at the International Wine and Food Festival in Banff a few years ago, of a young American GI who smelled a smell so horrible emanating from a cave that he took a flamethrower and incinerated the cave’s contents, convinced it must contain rotting corpses. Turned out it contained the local specialty, a cave-aged cheese.
This probably didn’t smell as bad as whatever cheese that was, but it certainly did smell. But we both love stinky cheese, so it wasn’t a problem for us. The matching wine, Valckenburg Madonna Auslese 2002, was the colour of apple juice, very, very good: quite sweet, but with a nice bit of acidity. It went well with the cheese, but then, said Margaret Anne, “I think the stinky cheese goes with everything.”
The seventh cheese was one we’d already bought and enjoyed from the Bulk Cheese Warehouse: Gouda Old Dutch Master. The beverage suggestion for this hard, strongly-flavored cheese is beer or Scotch. We had it instead with Frickenhauser Kapellenberg Bacchus Kabinett 1999. Apparently we didn’t like it very much the last time we had it at one of these events, as we were reminded (people actually read this blog? Who knew?). We didn’t like it all that much this time, either. Margaret Anne felt it exhibits “florally soapiness” and neither of us felt it matched the cheese all that well. Ed liked the wine by itself better than with the cheese, and liked the Madonna with the cheese better still. (A little Madonna was all Ed had left in his glass at that point.)
The eighth and final cheese was Chevre, a fresh, mild goat cheese which, we were informed, is very high in fat because goats give less milk and thus it has a higher fat and protein content than cow milk. It was matched with a Seaview Sparkling Shiraz, the only non-German wine served this evening (it’s Australian). Margaret Anne and I love the E&E Sparkling Pepper Shiraz. We found the Seaview fruitier and less complex than the E&E but still quite nice, and a good match for the Chevre.
And that was that. The next GWS event is dinner with a winemaker, from Lingenfelder. We’ll be there, and we’ll be blogging!
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