Wines & cheeses with Liz Wheadon
Our monthly Channel Wines and Cheeses columnist is Liz Wheadon, General Manager of Glengarry Wines. 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.
Cooking with Cheese
Before adding cheese to your favourite dish, here’s a few helpful tips on styles and types of cheeses that like to be cooked – some are often best – just eaten perfectly ripe.
Starting first with a reminder of what cheese is composed of and then what happens when you add it to cooking and heat it. Cheese is primarily fat, proteins and any moisture left – this off course depends on whether it’s a soft cheese or hard cheese. Once you heat cheese to 140 degrees or above, the proteins join together – coagulate and separate from the fat and moisture in the cheese – leaving a quite tough and stringy mass. This is exaggerated if you heat cheese for a long period of time.
Cheeses with a higher moisture content and lower fat – some of the fresh cheeses like cottage cheese, ricotta and fresh feta do not tolerate heat and long periods of heat well. These cheeses if cooked are best cooked quickly or added to the dish near the end; otherwise they can end up very tough. Ricotta of course is great in a filling of pasta – but won’t melt, it’ll cook to a nice texture, and this is due to the high moisture content.
The cheeses that do melt well are the cheeses with a higher fat content – like Mozzarella, Provolone, Taleggio and Raclette. These are all great melting cheeses. As they melt well, they are also excellent cheeses to add to sauces as they blend well with the dish.
If you are aiming to have the cheeses melt into the dish, it’s best to grate, crumble or shred the cheese into the dish.
Here’s a few of my ‘matches made in heaven’ when cooking with cheese.
Goat’s cheese and Beetroot is a classic combination. I love to make a very simply beetroot and goats cheese tart. Firstly by cooking the beetroot, cooling and finely slicing. Then take some puff pasty, cut a square or circle, place it on a lined oven tray, cover the pastry with another piece of baking paper and put another oven tray on top. Bake for about 10 minutes or until cooked and golden. Place the sliced beetroot on top, add a slice of goat’s cheese, and place back in the oven for 3 – 4 minutes until the cheese is warm to touch. Serve with a salad and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
Taleggio and caramelised onions – another classic. Firstly the onions, sweet the onions till soft, add a table spoon of brown sugar and a good splash of balsamic vineyard. Stir until well caramelised. Cut a piece of puff pastry, place the onions on top, add a few slices of Taleggio and add a sprig of thyme. Bake for 15 minutes. Perfect with Gisselbrecht Pinot Gris 2009.
Tasting Wine
Never been to a tasting? Always wanted to, but not sure what to expect? This month I’ve prepared a quick guide to wine tasting with a few tips to help towards making you a wine tasting expert.
What to expect?
Glengarry stores hold a number of different styles of tasting in different events; I’ve broken them into three sections to explain the format and style;
Cellar Tastings – these are held in our Jervois Road Cellar and Victoria Park Cellar. Due to the size of the cellars, these are usually for fifteen people; they are small gatherings and offer an opportunity for all those there to get involved in the tasting.
Wine Club tastings – each Glengarry store runs a wine club. These are monthly tastings, there’s no joining fee, to be added to a wine club list, simply talk to the team in store and they’ll add you to their database. You’ll then receive updates on tastings coming up in that store. Wineclub tastings are usually for 30 people, held in store and are great local events.
Events - these are generally held at our Victoria Park store –Large tastings, usually sitting down and formally presented. At these Events there are up to
sixty people.
How to taste?
Tasting wine is using the senses of sight, smell and taste to consciously assess a wine’s quality. Mostly what we regard as our sense of taste is actually what we smell, with most of us capable of recognising around 10,000 different aromas.
When tasting wine the first sense to use is sight – hold the glass up to a white background and look at the clarity – is the wine bright or dull? Look at the colour – is it the same all over or different around the edges? Swirl the wine around your glass and look at the legs or tears (this is the wine running down the glass)– this shows you how viscous the wine is and gives you an idea of the alcohol level – the slower the legs come down, the more viscous.
Next smell the wine, to do this swirl the wine around the glass, have a good sniff (you’ll need to get your nose right into the glass) your first impression will be the most important – don’t think too hard or over analysis it. What do you smell? What does it remind you of?
Now it’s time to taste the wine, when you taste you will sense different things in the various parts of your mouth. Sweetness on the top of the tongue, acidity around the sides, bitterness on the very back of the palate, Astringency and tannins around the edge of the mouth and gums. When you taste the wine, make sure you roll the wine around your mouth to ensure it touches every surface, try to suck some air through the wine as you draw it into your mouth.
The hardest bit is then translating your thoughts of the wine and what you’ve tasted into words, this takes time and practice. The important thing to remember is that you can never be wrong, the whole process is a very personal thing and what you think of the wine, what you like and appreciate is all that matters.
How can you learn more about wine tasting?
A good way to start is by attending a Glengarry tasting – why not start with the Glengarry Takapuna Wine Club Tasting at Didas Food store on April 28? There’s also the Glengarry Wine Academy, originally started to train our staff. We now run Stage 1 and Stage 2 courses for the public. Stage 1 introduces you to the art of tasting, the different grape varieties and styles. Stage 2 explores each variety in depth and looks at its various expressions around the world. To find out more about the tastings around Glengarry and the Glengarry Wine Academy visit www.glengarry.co.nz/events
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