Eat This Podcast

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Traditionally, the wine to drink with a bit of cheese was always a red wine. But tastes have changed, and nowadays you can find lots of recommendations for white wines to drink with cheeses. Those recommendations — all of them — are based on personal opinion, what one person likes or finds enjoyable. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Most recommendations are just that. But I was somewhat surprised to learn that although there have been lots of studies of how expert tasters describe not oney wine or cheese but just about anything, until now there has been almost no research into how the taste of one thing affects another.

A recent paper in the Journal of Food Science asked how cheese affects the taste of wine, using a technique called temporal dominance of sensation, which is itself a fairly new approach to describing taste and especially how it changes over time. As it happens, the conclusions of this scientific study mostly mirror recent advice: white wine is usually a safer choice. I spoke to Mara Galmarini, the researcher behind the paper and to Edward Behr, editor of the Art of Eating newsletter, who has been a long-time champion of white wine with cheese.

Notes

1. Mara Galmarini’s paper, with colleagues, is Use of Multi-Intake Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) to Evaluate the Influence of Cheese on Wine Perception.
2. Edward Behr’s Art of Eating newsletter is, in my view, indispensable.
3. Banner and cover photos courtesy of CSGA, Dijon. Additional photo by Isabelle Puaut
4. If you haven’t already heard it, may I suggest you pair this episode with a much earlier one: An Italian wine education.

   Huffduff it

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If you heard the episode on microshiners you’ll know that there is something of a boom in small-scale distilling. And you might be worried that every boom seems to be followed by a bust. One distiller, however, told me that it was an economic bust that kickstarted the malt whisky boom.

For most of its history, the only malt whisky most people ever drank was as a component in blended whisky. The stockmarket crash of 1973 and subsequent oil crises meant that people had no cash for whisky, which was costing more as a result of higher oil prices. Distilleries were shut and mothballed, and, desperate for a bit of cash, the big whisky blenders started to market single malts, which had all gone into blends before.

That seemed worth investigating in more detail, so I did just that. And I discovered that the story is a little bit more complicated. Booms and busts, however, have definitely played a part in the history of malt whisky. Will the draft distillery story end in tears? Some say no, others yes. Me, I just want to try some of their products.

Notes

1. Mark Reynier’s Waterford Distillery looks absolutely fascinating. One to try and visit next time I’m in Ireland, for sure.
2. Whisky Max, Charles Maclean’s website, is a great source of information about whisky and how to enjoy it.
3. If you want to go deep, very deep, into scotch whisky, you need Alan Gray’s Scotch Whisky Industry Review.
4. I learned an amazing amount from Scotch Whisky: History, Heritage and the Stock Cycle, a journal article by Julie Bower.
5. If you want a personal tour of Scotland, Alastair Cunningham is your man.
6. Aeneas Coffey is easy enough to run to ground. Aeneas MacDonald, the great whisky writer, maybe less so.
7. Banner image © Glenfarclas Distillery, seen here