Wines & Cheeses with Liz Wheadon
Our monthly Channel Wines and Cheeses columnist is Liz Wheadon, General Manager of Glengarry Wines. Initially interested in a career in the culinary area, whilst living for a year in the UK, Liz had the opportunity to attend a Cordon Bleu course in London. She found herself drawn to wine, which quickly became her passion and her career. Late in 1994, Liz started working for Glengarry Wines. Interestingly, her first role was as Retail Sales Assistant in the Glengarry Takapuna store. Whilst wine is a passion, and now the direction of her career, Liz is also a passionate foodie. Weekends are often spent first planning the event and then entertaining friends and family with magnificent food and wine experiences.
What makes blue-cheese blue?
Blue cheese’s are cheese’s that have been ’infected’ with Penicillium roqueforti or Penicillium glaucu.
The process of making blue cheese starts as with other cheese, a starter culture is added to the milk, the curds and whey separate. The curds are then gathered and pressed into a mould. It’s important that the curds are not too tightly packed or pressed with blue cheese making as the Penicillium needs air to create that lovely blue characteristic. After some time maturing the young cheese is pierced with rods to create more air and give the Penicillium more space to grow.
Three of the great cheese’s of the world are blue – Stilton, Roquefort AOC and Gorgonzola.
Stilton is the King of English Cheese.
A whole wheel of Stilton is generally quick large – 7kg or so. It’s an historic English cheese, the first being made around 1720, and is now a protected trademark in the EU.(Production well regulated.) Stilton cheese can only come from the three counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. The milk must be pasteurised before use, it has to be cylindrical, form its own coat, never be pressed and the veins must radiate from the centre. It has a creamy crumbly texture, with strong
distinctive taste.
Roquefort is a French blue made from unpasteurised milk.
The story of this superb cheese dates back many years, it’s said that a shepherd whilst tending his sheep, left a bit of cheese in the limestone caves of Combalou, on remembering where he’d left it, he returned to retrieve it to discover a wonderful blue cheese. It’s these same lime stone caves that each year age thousands of Roquefort cheeses. Roquefort is a rich creamy blue, it is one of the cheeses allowed into New Zealand unpasteurised.
Gorgonzola is from the Piedmont and Lombardy regions of Italy.
There’s around 80 producers now regulated to produce true Gorgonzola. It is a creamy blue, a little more like Roquefort than Stilton. It’s excellent kitchen ingredient – try it in a salad with salad greens, Walnuts, roughly chopped pieces of Gorgonzola, dressed and topped with a salty cured meat – Proscuitto is perfect.
Didas Takapuna stocks all three of these Blue cheeses, along side some excellent New Zealand examples of Blue cheese.
Riesling does not get the justice it deserves!
A white grape variety, Riesling hails from the Rhine region in Germany and is also quite at home in the region of Alsace in France. It’s part of the aromatic group of grape varieties. It’s a fragile grape variety that produces wines that wear many hats. Riesling can made in a varieties of styles, anything from bone dry to exceedingly sweet.
Grown in numerous parts of the world, including Austria, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, the States, Canada and South Africa. Riesling was first planted in New Zealand in the 70’s and in those days flourished. It found it’s home particularly in Marlborough and Martinborough, along with Central Otago and Nelson, where’ there’s some outstanding wines being made.
Riesling is also a grape variety that matches well with a large variety of foods. This has a lot to do with the varying styles in which it’s produced by also in the characteristics of the wine. Often Riesling has great fruit weight, some residual sweetness (even if the finish is dry) and has a level of acidity. In fact Riesling is one of the best wines to match with cheese.
So much praise and admiration for Riesling, yet it’s not a popular variety from our shelves (unless it’s our staff or winemakers purchasing) One of the challenges we’ve found is knowing what you’ll get in the bottle. Not shy at putting our best step forward, we recently took on the challenge of changing this. We went through and tasted, re-tasted, sorted, and tasted again, all the Riesling that we stock. With all that acidity you’ll understand that what initially seemed like fun, but the end of the day was a little bit much - but we survived. We’ve transposed this into a Riesling scale onto our shelves and on line dividing the wines into four categories, Dry, Medium Dry, Medium Sweet and Sweet. The wines were grouped into these by their perceived sweetness, so not the residual sugar from a technical point, but what you’ll find in the glass.
We trust you’ll enjoy exploring this in our Takapuna and Devonport Glengarry stories and go forth and buy Riesling with confidence you’ll know what you are getting!
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