Match of the week

Beenleigh Blue and Monbazillac

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on January 25 2017 at 11:22

It’s not only Roquefort and Sauternes that pair well together, other sheeps cheeses and sweet wines match well too as I discovered at the Evening of Cheese event I hosted at The Butlers Arms in Sutton Coldfield on Sunday

It was a mammoth cheesefest with FOUR courses of cheese, followed by a tartiflette! The blues were Colston Basset Stilton and Beenleigh Blue, a salty, sheeps’ milk cheese from Ticklemore Cheese* in Devon which is modelled on (though paler and less veined than) a Roquefort.

The three options were a Portuguese red called Porta 6, a 2011 Domaine de Grangeneuve Monbazillac which is a Sauternes-style wine from near Bergerac just outside the Bordeaux region and a sloe gin (one of my favourite pairings for Stilton) but it was the delicate sweet Monbazillac that really shone with the Beenleigh Blue.

The other two outstanding pairings of the evening for me were a mature Montgomery cheddar with Lagunitas IPA and Stinking Bishop with Poire William (a pear-flavoured eau de vie). Stinking Bishop is washed in perry (pear cider) so that stood to reason.

* you can buy it from the Courtyard Dairy who were one of the sponsors of my cheese e-book, 101 Great Ways to Enjoy Cheese & Wine

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