New Guidelines Lead to Great Matches - The Pour BACK in the old days, before the Internet or even electricity, red wine and cheese were thought to belong together as surely as pomp and circumstance. It was customary to serve the cheese course after the meal, to be consumed with the red that remained in the bottle after the roast had been finished. It seemed so obvious it did not warrant debate. "Cheese and red wine have natural affinities for each other," James Beard wrote in the 1949 edition of "The Fireside Cookbook," neatly wrapping up in one short sentence his entire discussion of pairing wines and cheeses. As with most conventional wisdom, it didn't bear up to scrutiny. Thoughtful people who stepped back to question this shibboleth came to realize that red wine did not always go so well with cheese. In fact, in certain painful combinations, red wine and cheese screeched like orange juice and toothpaste. Ah, but white wine with cheese? Much better. Natural affinities! And so, over the last 15 years many people rejected the dogma of red wine with cheese. In its place a new orthodoxy took hold: Red wine with cheese is a hidebound formula for disaster, while white wines of all sorts, including sweet wines, flatter cheeses. So do many beers. But red wines? Forget it. Clearly, some good sense underlies this new doctrine. White wines and beers, in general, are much more versatile with cheese than are red wines. Tannic, oaky reds can neutralize the nuanced flavors of complex cheeses, while strong cheeses can obliterate delicate or fragile reds. Nonetheless, I hate to see these old friends broken up on the basis of assumptions that are as unexamined as those that once bound them together. First of all, it is simply untrue that red wine and cheese cannot complement and improve each other. Good matches abound. To decide categorically that cheese goes only with white wines is to deprive oneself of a great deal of pleasure. More important, sound, practical reasons favor this historic combination, or at least, argue against fearing it. "I tell people not to be afraid," said Tia Keenan, who recently became the first director of food services for Murray's Cheese, and whose first job is to develop a cheese and wine bar for Murray's near the flagship store on Bleecker Street. The worst-case scenario is that you have a wine with a cheese that doesn't really go so well together - nothing more tragic. The custom of drinking red wine with cheese grew from the natural order of long, involved feasts. As a meal progressed through the customary courses of soup, fish, fowl and meats, the wines traveled a parallel progression from light-bodied whites to bigger whites, lighter reds and heavier reds. The best reds were saved for the cheese. Even as late as 1974, when Craig Claiborne, the food editor of The New York Times at the time, wrote an article fantasizing about his perfect last meal, he selected for the cheese course (Brie, naturally) a 1959 Romanée-Conti, simply one of the greatest red wines ever, still young at 15 years, but subtle enough that if it were my last meal I might have had it with the squab (which Mr. Claiborne paired with a 1947 Château Ausone). Of course, nobody eats like this anymore. Even historically, few outside the realm of the manor house and haute cuisine ever sat down to such epic and layered meals. Far more commonly in history, a meal was bread and hard cheese. The beverage was red wine. You consumed them together because that's what you had. Even today, when our choices are far more extensive, the situation remains the same. A couple sit down for dinner at home, open a modest bottle of wine with the meal and finish it off with a bit of cheese. If that wine happens to be red, what are they to do, omit the cheese? Open another bottle of white wine? Nope. Simply enjoy the red and the cheese without undue concern. "Americans fear making egregious errors in pairing food and wine," said Max McCalman, dean of curriculum at artisanalcheese.com and author of the book "Mastering Cheese." In more cases than not, cheese and wine pairings do work. I can attest to that. Recently, with a 2010 Côtes du Rhône Brézème from Eric Texier, the sort of excellent but modest red wine that I'm happy to drink on any given night, I sampled a few different sorts of cheeses and found many of them to be enjoyable, even unexpected matches. Up in Smoke, a smoked, fresh, creamy goat cheese from Oregon, was delicious with the savory Brézème. So was Jasper Hill's Harbison, an oozy, soft, bloomy rind cheese from Vermont with a pronounced fruitiness. Best of all was one of my favorites, Ossau Iraty Vieille, a hard raw sheep's milk cheese from the French Pyrenees. This pairing was brilliant, the earthy qualities of both wine and cheese enhancing and amplifying each other. That Ossau Iraty also went very well with a bright, lively and well-balanced 2009 Sonoma Coast pinot noir from Kesner, which also, by the way, was superb with an aged Cabot clothbound Cheddar. I know that a Selles-sur-Cher, a fresh, buttery goat cheese dusted in wood ash from the Loire Valley, will go beautifully with sauvignon blanc and Champagne. Guess what? It also was great with a 2010 Valpolicella Classico from Monte dall'Ora.