Cheese and Crackers

We had dinner last night with our daughter and her fiance', but we started with a trio of cheese and crackers. Cream cheese with garlic and chives. A red-wine soaked goat cheese. And a garlic jack. Also water crackers and jalapeno stuffed olives.

We had the ever-present Pacific Rim dry Riesling and a Kenwood Merlot.

Wine snob hubby gave me a taste of the merlot with a cracker spread with cream cheese. I tasted the wine first and had no strong feelings and no strong sense of what it tasted like. I try not to read labels until I've at least tasted it so I don't taste with any preconceptions of what flavors I should be finding.

Anyway, nothing from the merlot at first sip. Ate the cracker and cheese. Tasted the merlot again. At first, not much. But on the finish, I tasted... berries! Then we checked the label and I was right! I rarely, if ever, can find the hints and flavors so I'm stoked. I tasted berries! And the other flavors (I don't know what they were, but I know they were there) were intensified after the cheese.

We repeated the process with the dry riesling. The results were disappointing. I enjoy the dry riesling with most foods, but the cheese just left the palate flat. The wine couldn't wake up the taste buds again.

WSH read me a quote from Karen MacNeil. She said caterers know the secret of serving cheese with low price wines. The cheese makes the wine seem better than it is.

I don't know what the Kenwood merlot runs, but the cheese certainly woke up my uneducated palate.