“I’m just crackers about cheese!”
- Wallace, Gromit, and Cheese!
I’m with Wallace on this one, and I think it’s probably safe to say all of us at Ridge are; we love cheese here. And fortunately, we have many occasions to serve it, and taste it. Of course, in the end, our mandate is to present our wines, so accordingly we select cheeses specifically for their contributions to the successful pairing paradigm. And being localists and site-specificists at heart, we traditionally make our selections from the extraordinary bounty on offer in Northern California.
“Blessed are the cheesemakers!”
from Monty Python's "Life of Brian"
And so they are! And that said, my primary impetus for writing this, and the reason why I have cheese on the brain this morning, is that I have just had the great pleasure of picking up our new cheese order, and it is comprised of a holy quartet of favorites …
Were these cheeses in fact a quartet, then Cypress Grove’s Humboldt Fog would have to be the cello; warm, resonant, dense, heavy, yet elegant and rich with gravitas and sonority …
And surely Cypress Grove’s Lambchopper, with the long, long strokes of its elegant and buttery finish, could play no other part than that of the rich, middle-layer viola …
And lastly, we have Redwood Hill Farms’ Camellia and Bellwether Farms’ Carmody dancing atop the quartet as the two violins; the tart and tang of goat’s milk and rind mimicking the pluck of pizzicato, and the warm Jersey milk evoking the elegant long strikes of a bow …
Ah, the beautiful music of cheese …
