The Wine Gift Shop

One of the best and certainly the most appreciated gifts you can receive is a wine and cheese gift basket. These are foods which are a part of our collective unconscious and fit together hand in glove. A proper pairing of wine and cheese is about as close as one can get to experiencing perfection.

Wine, of course is the star of these gift baskets and will provide the canvas on which your cheese will provide its flavors. The wine should be picked out first and a cheese picked to pair with it. There are far more excellent wine and cheese pairings than there is room for in this article; instead, we’ll look at a few sample wine and cheese pairings for whites, reds and dessert wines.

White Wine

Sauvignon Blanc – this is a fresh, crisp and tangy tasting white wine with elements of grass and fruits (particularly gooseberry) in its flavor. This is a popular choice for a wine and cheese gift basket and pairs well with the following three cheeses: one is a goat cheese, one made from sheep’s milk and another from cow’s milk. This provides a rounded set of pairings for this wine.

Buche de Chevre is our goat cheese here. This is a wonderfully sharp and tangy cheese which is rich and creamy towards the center. Our sheep’s milk cheese will be a Pecorino Toscano, a 40 day old cheese which has a complex flavor profile and is redolent of wildflowers, grass and herbs. It works well not only with the wine, but the Chevre as well. The cow cheese here is Fontina Vail d’Aosta. A cheese with a grassy flavor with hints of fruit.

All you need now for this wine and cheese gift basket is some crackers and wine glasses and fini!

Red Wine

For a wine and cheese gift basket, try Port. This is a fortified wine from Portugal which comes in two basic varieties: ruby and tawny. Ruby is famous for its rich, intense berry and plum flavor, tawny for its nutty, caramel-like flavor.

There are four cheeses which are excellent with either type: The Spanish blue cheese Cabrales, Sharp Cheddar, The wonderful English blue cheese Blue Stilton and another Spanish cheese, the sheep’s milk cheese Agour Ossau-Iraty.

All you need now is some wine glass charms, glasses, crackers and cloth napkins (some of the cheeses in this basket are crumbly); and you have made a delightful red wine and cheese gift basket.

Dessert Wine

Champagne is the obvious choice for this wine and cheese gift basket. Make it a celebration with French Brie; well known and much loved among French cheeses, Vintage Irish Cheddar for its mouth filling, creamy flavor and wonderful texture. Chaorce comes from the same region as does Champagne itself and is amazingly rich and creamy with a hint of mushroom flavor.

For this gift basket, add some party favors to make it more celebratory. Wine and cheese pairings offer a fascinating topic for exploration. There are so many wines and cheeses out there that you could never try them all – or could you?

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