Wine Part 2, Cheese Part 2

Wine
In a Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a little girl gets a cup of coffee so she can smell it, but she doesn’t like the taste. This is how I feel about wine. If only it tasted as good as it smells.

You know that whole ritual they say you should go through at a wine tasting? The smelling and swishing? I’ve been skipping that part all my life. Chug. Slam that wine back. You have to chug it because it tastes awful.

Well, we’ve been trying a few half-bottles to prepare for France, and the last few days I’ve noticed I spend a lot of time smelling it, and taking tiny sips and rolling it all over my tongue, and I really enjoy it – until I have to swallow. It’s the swallowing, that’s when it tastes bad, what they call “The Finish.” I suppose I could be a spitter, not a swallower, but that just seems like a tacky thing to do.

Cheese
So we made another cheese run today, this time at Whole Foods. Whole Foods labels all of its raw milk unpasteurized cheeses “RAW.” I asked the cheesemeister if there was any difference in taste between milk cheese and raw milk cheese. He claimed the difference was so small as to be imperceptible. So I grabbed up a pasteurized version of yesterday’s favorite cheese, the Pyrénées Ossau-Iraty, and yes, we did a side-by-side taste test when we got home. One tasted like cheese, one tasted like a plastic version of cheese. I want to buy a goat now so I can make my own unpasteurized cheese.

I know this all sounds very snobby. (Moi? Snobby?) Truly, this won’t become a blog that smells lead pencils in wine and goes on about a cheese mouthfeel. You know me, a perpetual beginner.