Details

For our red wines we prepared two varieties of Schärdinger’s Affineur range:

• Affineur Le Rosé, a hard cheese treated with Rosé wine, herbs and spices, and
• Affineur Asmonte, a spicy and strong hard cheese Italian style.

With our sweet wines we served Schärdinger’s Österkron, a savoury blue-veined mould cheese.

As already suggested by its name, Le Rosé is the ideal partner for our Rosato 2010. The wine and the cheese did not fight for the centre stage but built a perfect harmony.

The spicy but mild Le Rosé also fit perfectly to our fruity red wines. We noticed that the young wines changed much more than the older vintages when consumed with the cheese. Especially Zweigelt and Zweigelt Classique, both vintage 2010, blended well with cheese and became much more accessible. 2007 Blaufränkisch or St Laurent, for example, haven’t changed their style in combination with the cheese.

Asmonte is the perfect companion for our powerful cuvées. This cheese made the typical young tannins more round. When tasting with the cheese, the wines seemed softer and more harmonious. During the Asmonte-tasting, Rosso e Nero 2009 clearly stood out: The wine became round and adjusted well to the cheese. Admiral and Rêve de Jeunesse on the other hand remained firm and kept their severity.

Although we chose Österkron for our sweet wines, we were curious and tasted it with the red wines, too. But we quickly realised that this cheese is too dominant for the reds. As expected, it’s an excellent match for our Rosso e Dolce 2010 though. The sweetness of the wine buffered the salty flavour of the cheese perfectly.

By the way, Rosso e Dolce 2010 also went very well with the Christmas cookies we offered in November. Being a Beerenauslese, the wine’s residual sugar level is not exuberant and therefore it emphasises the taste of the cookies cleverly.

As a little surprise during the cheese tasting, we also opened a bottle of a dry Neuburger 1990. With 15% vol it was still in good condition and went well with all three cheese types, also the Österkron.

Tasting the various cheeses with our different wines was a great experience for us and our customers. We will of course continue experimenting to offer exceptional sensations of taste again and again.