Wine and Cheese: Two Products or One Association? A New Method for Assessing Wine-Cheese Pairing

The aim of this study was to identify which attributes impacted the dynamic liking of cheese and wine individually, as well as when consumed together. Three wines (one white, Pouilly Loche; and two red, Maranges and Beaujolais) and three cheeses (Comte, Epoisses, Chaource) were individually evaluated by a group of 60 consumers using mono-intake Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) with simultaneous hedonic ratings. The same data acquisition screen was used for all products showing a unique list of 14 descriptors (covering cheese and wine perception) and a hedonic scale for dynamical rating of liking. The dynamic hedonic data were associated with the TDS profiles obtaining Temporal Drivers of Liking (TDL). Furthermore, the nine associations that resulted from combining each wine with each cheese were evaluated by multi-bite and multi-sip TDS. Individually, Chaource had practically no TDL; for Comte, mushroom flavor was a positive TDL, and in Epoisses, salty was a negative TDL. As for wines, negative TDL were only found in the red wines: bitter, sour and astringent. Positive TDL for wines were: fruity, spicy and woody. Changes in the dynamic perception had a bigger impact on liking of wine compared to cheese. For the associations, the negative TDL were only three and mostly wine related: sour (for seven out of nine combinations), bitter (six out of nine) and astringent (five out of nine). Positive TDL were more varied (a total of 10 descriptors) and were related either to wine or cheese. As opposed to what was found in cheese alone, salty was a positive TDL in two of the combinations. It was observed that the dynamic sensory perception had a more important impact on liking in wine-cheese combinations than when consumed separately. TDS and TDL have a big potential in the study of food pairing, which should be further exploited.