A Cheesy Anniversary

I’ve never been to a wine and cheese tasting, and I am no connoisseur. I just felt it necessary as my partner is French and has been telling me I need “better taste”. Whatever. The good news: I have a good taste now thanks to Tasting with Nivard – AKA Geoffrey’s Wine and Cheese Den (not really). Not really a den, but it was held in Funky Cellar down in the basement of the cheese and wine shop. You’d get exactly what you think you’d get when told to go down the stairs into the basement; mannequins dressed to the nines, a back wall filled with cylinders filled with wine bottles, tacky without being tacky art deco vibes. Enough about the venue. Let’s get onto the tasting. The cheese. The wine. The pairings. My partner, upon learning that the second pairing was Comte (his favourite) and white wine, was droning on and on about how sacrilegious it was. Until he tasted it. This die-hard Frenchman, once a lover of the one true pairing of red wine and cheese, has been converted. The conversion continued through the night as we went through the white wine pairings. From the first pairing of goat’s cheese and Chartreux all the way to the end of blue cheese and Rose, we became fans of the craziest wine and cheese pairings we thought possible! But let me tell you about my favourite so that you can get down to this tasting as soon as humanly possible. It wasn’t even about the wine for me at this point, but the greatest cheese expertly tasted and paired by Geoffrey at the market at 7 AM just that morning. This cheese. THIS. CHEESE. Is the best cheese I have ever tasted in my life. It’s called Tomme aux Fleurs, and as much as I want to yammer on about the flavour profiling paired with the Malbec, I think it’s best you just go and try it yourself. We would have bought the wheel if it was available. What I will say though is that it is covered in 7 different flower petals, but it doesn’t taste floral in the slightest. It is herby, it is rich, it is the most amazing cheese I have ever had! At the end of the tasting, there’s a fun little game you get to play by QR code where you’re given a cheese you haven’t yet tasted. You answer questions such as country of origin and milk type. If you win (which we did; yay bonus question for being tied and my partner being French so he knows his grapes!) you receive an email from Geoffrey for some money off one of his curated cheese boxes. Overall, this is a more than fun date night. You eat a little, you drink a little, and you learn a lot.