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Vintage or vile, wine is all the same after cheese

18 January 2006

NEXT time you are organising a cheese and wine party, don’t waste your money on quality wine. Cheese masks the subtle flavours that mark out a good wine, so your guests won’t be able to tell that you are serving them cheap stuff.

Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann of the University of California, Davis, presented trained wine tasters with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavours and aromas in each wine both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses.

They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including…

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