Master Cheesemonger at the Nantucket Wine Festival

Matthew Jennings: I own an artisan teashop in Providence, Rhode Island with an adjacent 40-seat New England bistro called Farmstead and the restaurant is called La Laiterie at Farmstead and we specialized in artisan American foods particularly cheeses.

Our goal today was to keep it real casual, interact with the guests and have a good time and find cheeses that you know did well the pairings.

Today, we had a cheese from New York called Conic, which is goat’s milk and cow’s milk blend. The cheese is called Princes Abby, which is a cow’s milk cheese from Cato Corner farm in Colchester, Connecticut. Sheep’s smoked cheese from Bellwether Farms in Sonoma County, California called San Andres.

Goat’s milk cheese from Vermont, Butter & Cheese Company called Couples and we ended with use blue which is a sheep’s milk blue cheese from Old Chatham Sheepherding Company in New York.

The best way to taste cheeses and wines together are to taste the cheese first by itself then taste the wine and then taste them together. In that way you are able to taste all those different nuances of each item, both the cheese and the wine and the delicate flavors that might exists in each of them. You have the opportunity to taste those by themselves first before you taste them together.

There are a couple different ways to really make sure that you ensure the quality and the freshness of your cheese. A lot of people tend to hit it home from the market and wrap it in plastic wrapper right away. That is pretty detrimental to the cheese. It doesn’t allow it to breathe at all. So the best thing to do is to bring the cheese home, rewrap it in either cheese paper if you can find it or put your paper, even aluminum foil is better than plastic wrap. Because even though you can’t see it there are some other preparations in aluminum foil that allow the food inside to breathe.

I think that pairing cheeses and wines can be actually quite difficult. There’s actually lot of nuances and cheeses and wines that tend to fight each other a lot of the time so it can be harder to design the perfect pairing.