Running wine tastings is generally great fun but sometimes it is a bit tricky. My heart sinks at those emails that arrive in my inbox with ‘cheese and wine tasting’ in the subject.

I cannot get excited about trying to come up with a list of wines to pair with mass-produced, plastic cheeses. However, when I get the chance to run such an event with my friend Robin from The Granary in Watlington (www.granarydeli.co.uk ) it is an altogether different story.

Robin sells the most delicious cheeses. So, when he says he has got eight great cheeses to bring along, you know they are going to be flavoursome and interesting; perfect for a bit of wine pairing.

Banish the cheese board. The best results will be achieved when you put one cheese with one wine. It is also nonsense to think that only red wine and ports make good partners to cheese. It can often be much easier to match a cheese with white wine.

The tasting we had to raise funds for the Tetsworth Village Hall made my point; eight times over.

We began with the fresh and fruity Montgomery Cheddar. It was a wine tasting but I could not resist putting it with a Herefordshire cider. The sweetness of the cider was a perfect foil for this slightly tart cheese.

Next came the Wigmore; a comparatively mild, creamy ewe’s milk cheese. A delicate cheese like this would sink without trace with a glass of heavy red.

However, when it was sampled with a crisp, zippy little Côtes de Gascogne (think Sauvignon Blanc-like qualities) it came alive.

I am always talking about the importance of matching the right weight of wine with the food on your plate and Robin and I did ourselves proud when we put a fairly rich, unoaked white Pecorino (wine, not cheese!) with the hard Spenwood cheese.

There was a faint sweetness to this full-flavoured cheese and it worked particularly well with the wine that both stood up to the flavours and even served to uplift them with its refreshing acidity.

We served both a Single and Double Gloucester cheese and due to the dramatic differences in flavour we opted for a white wine with the Single and red for the Double. The Single Gloucester had a crisp saltiness that was perfectly offset by the off-dry New Zealand Chenin Blanc, whilst the considerably richer and more powerful Double shone with a five-year-old Nebbiolo from north east Italy.

The breadth of flavours in the aged Nebbiolo worked a treat with the depth of the cheese and it was one of my favourite partnerships of the evening.

Comté has to be one of my favourite cheeses. I love its sweet fruitiness and its melt-in-the-mouth texture.

I can actually think of a few white wines that would have worked well with it but in the end I decided to match melt-in-your-mouth with velvety smooth and put it with a Merlot-dominated Bordeaux.

Again, it was the matching of weight that really made this work, and the fact they both had sufficient flavour to complement rather than overwhelm each other.

When we opted to serve an Argentine Malbec with the Old Amsterdam I was not sure whether it was going to work, but it did.

The savoury buttery cheese had really substantial flavours, gained from longer ageing, and this was what the rich, finely-textured Malbec needed. A surprising success.

No cheese-and-wine tasting would be complete without at least one glass of port and with it we wheeled out the Barkham Blue.

Again, the saltiness and richness of the cheese was ideal with the rich, sweet port.

I do not deny that there are some truly wonderful, traditional partnerships but there is nothing wrong with experimenting from time to time; you will surprise yourself with how rewarding it can be.

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