The Slow Food Cheese is one of the most amazing, exciting and worthwhile cheese events I know of. For a long weekend the picturesque medieval town of Bra reinvents itself as an immense open air stage, with producers, cheesemongers, affineurs, writers, heavy users and plain regular cheese lovers from all over the world streaming in, discussing, debating, tasting, learning and enjoying. You bet Heinzelcheese can’t miss that one…
I was proud and honored to organize and present the very first of a whole program of fascinating taste workshops, on Friday at 1pm, on the subject of ripening, or age, on cheese and wine. We tasted two German-speaking Alpine hard cheeses, each at three different age-levels, as well as three dry German Riesling wines, each of them in a current vintage, that is young, and in a mature one, around ten years old.
What happens with time? How and why does it affect what we taste? And what does that mean in terms of pairing wine and cheese? I had been much looking forward to explore all these questions with you: the cheeses are selected by Kaeskuche, the wines generously sponsored by my grower friends Gysler (Rheinhessen), Tesch (Nahe) und Weil (Rheingau).
You filled every single seat the beautiful venue at the Liceo Scientifico, that actually used to be a church (I took the picture before the event, obviously). How it alll went? Well, for a very comprehensive, thorough and complete report, I’ll hand you gladly (and gratefully!!!) over to Simone Gie from Slow Wine – go read. Then rethink about age… and come to Bra in September 2017, when the next Cheese will take place, and in the meantime to Berlin, where we do our own Cheese in November; a little smaller, but every bit as exciting and every year, at Markthalle Neun. Cheesio!