Thinking outside the wine box

David Lebovitz goes unconventional with cheese

By Culinate staff

January 14, 2011

It’s the middle of winter, the time of year when — bubbly at New Year’s excepted — you’re probably drinking a lot of heavy red wines with all that hearty seasonal fare. But David Lebovitz, in a recent thoughtful post on his blog, takes exception to this traditional assumption, offering several arguments in favor of white wine. His main reason? Whites can pair really, really well with cheese.

Lebovitz also likes pairing wines and cheeses from the same region, on the principle of like goes with like. And he likes the fact that white is literally less heavy-hitting than red; his amusing French-style analogy for this is that reds are like men, tough and brutal, while whites are “much more nuanced and interesting, like women.”

He doesn’t mention it, but while white wine can be damaging to tooth enamel, drinking it with a cheese course can mitigate the problem. A classic French solution indeed.