Just like bacon and egg, milk and cereal, doughnut and coffee, the combination of wine and cheese when paired together makes a perfect couple! A new scientific study has found that eating cheese with wine makes the drink taste better.
Scientists from the Centre for Taste and Feeding Behavior in Dijon, led by food scientist Mara Galmarin, published the results of their study in the Journal of Food Science. It says there that when wine and cheese are eaten together will give human tastes buds a better flavor.
Two kinds of white and two kinds of red wine (Pacherenc, Sancerre, Bourgogne, and Madiran) with four kinds of cheese (Epoisses, Comté, Roquefort, and Crottin de Chavignol) were found to give a very satisfying feeling for the mouth. Researchers recruited a small sample group of 31 volunteers tasters to sample a number of different wines and cheeses and rate their enjoyment.
In the first session, the volunteers sampled the wine alone. The red wines were served at a temperature of 64 degrees Fahrenheit and the white wine at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The volunteers were asked to take a sip, hold it in their mouths and click a screen that presented them with 11 different flavors, such as sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, herby and yellow fruit. They could click as many of them as they wanted since the dominant flavor may change.
After few minutes, another screen appeared that allowed them to choose between "I did not like it at all" and "I liked it very much." Each wine was supposed to be tasted and rated three times.
In the next sessions, the cheese was incorporated into the tasting rules and was served in equally small and exact portions. Each of the four kinds of cheese was sampled before and after sips of each of the four wines, which meant 16 different wine-cheese pairs. The wines were rated in the same way just like in the first session.
"Thanks to our research we learned the duration of the perception of the astringency of a certain wine could be reduced after having cheese and the four evaluated kinds of cheese had the same effect," said lead researcher Mara Galmarini.
After all the experiments, the researchers found that the effect of the wine and cheese, when paired together, is good.
