Poor Man's Wine Cheese Pairing

     Hosting a wine and cheese pairing can easily come with a large pricetag. So for this pairing I thought it would be fun to see how it would go with the cheese that I already had in my fridge. I then went to Kroger and tried to find the cheapest wines available to round out this poor man's cheese pairing.

Me and my boyfriend..afraid to sit down and face this pairing

Poor man's paper cheese plate with accompanying wines 

   These are the extremely high quality cheeses I had on hand. It includes mozzerella, swiss and american cheese; all in the $2-$3 range. 

             

     After some scavenging, I managed to find these small bottles of Gallo Family wines that cost a whopping $1.50 each. There were five different wines but for this pairing I chose the White Zinfandel, Moscato, and Pinot Noir.

     

     The Gallo Family Vineyard is located in Modesto, California and produce a wide range of wines from a Chardonnay to a Merlot. The first wine that I tasted was the White Zinfandel, on the nose it had lots of strawberries. Upon tasting, the strawberries definitely came through but I also tasted lots of citrus on the tail end, altogether it was much sweeter than I expected. I felt that this paired best with the swiss cheese and helped to mellow out some of the funkiness of the cheese.

Gallo Family White Zinfandel

     The second wine I tasted was the moscato. This moscato had the same nose as most moscatos I have tasted recently but upon tasting I really enjoyed this one. I tasted lots of peach and typical moscato citrus fruits but there was also an element of honey. I liked this wine best with the mozzarella but I feel that may be due to the fact that I have cheese sticks and fruit as a snack most days so it was familiar to me.

Gallo Family Moscato

     The final wine that I tasted was the Pinot Noir. Similarly as with the White Zinfandel, I was extremely surprised that I liked this wine as much as I did. As with most reds, I struggled to divide between the flavors I experienced but I know that there were some very heavy cherry notes with this wine. I liked this wine best with the mozzarella because the bitterness of the wine balanced out a bit my the minimal sweetness of the cheese. The swiss was too sharp and didn't balance well.

Gallo Family Pinot Noir 

      This wine and cheese pairing was about about what I expected it to be given the raw materials I was working with. However, the Gallo Family wines did surprise me and it was nice to be able to tolerate a red wine. Also, you may notice that the american cheese was not ever mentioned, and that is because it didn't taste good by itself, let alone pair it with a wine.