Wine Dinner: Pizza Night

This week for wine dinner, we kept all of our foods and wines pretty basic. We had cheddar cheese for an "appetizer", Domino's Pizza for the main course, and a peanut-butter cup pie for dessert. For wine, we had a pink moscato, a cabernet sauvignon, and a moscato. We did not put much thought into
these pairings, so we had some very interesting results.

For our appetizer, which really was more like a quick snack, we had Kroger brand sharp cheddar cubes. By themselves, these cubes are pretty basic tasting. The fact that it was sharp cheddar made them a little more flavorful than usual. The pink moscato (Gum Drop Pink Moscato) made the cubes taste more buttery, and much less sharp than they normally are. By itself, it is quite light and fruity with a little bit of a fizz to it. This was quite differnt from the cabernet sauvignon (Century Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon) which made the cheddar cubes much sharper. The cabernet sauvignon was not my favorite wine to begin with, so I was not surprised by this effect. The moscato (Beringer Moscato) was not a bad wine by itself. It was a pretty run of the mill mosacto, but it had an interesting interaction with the cheddar cubes. It definitely lost some of its sweetness, and it sort of enhanced the cheese's bite. It was a very interesting pairing.

Our main course was different kinds of Domino's Pizza. I personally sampled all of my wines with plain cheese pizza. I was not very surprised when a lot of my experience with the pizza was similar to the cheese cubes we had for appetizers. The biggest difference was the crust. Domino's has this nice seasoning on their crust that is somewhat garlicy, which greatly impacts the flavors of wines. The pink moscato lost a lot of its sweetness with the crust, and it replaced it with an odd sort of dry taste. It is a very hard flavor to describe. The cabernet sauvignon didn't go with the pizza at all. It was very hard for me to put my finger on which one impacted the other more. The pizza made the wine more acidic, while the wine somehow seemed to dry out the pizza. I did not enjoy that particular pairing. The merlot with the pizza was yet another mismatched tasting. These were two very different tastes. and they just didn't flow together very well.

For dessert we had a peanut-butter cup pie. The pie by itself was quite sweet, and I had never paired peanut butter flavored anything together with wine before. I enjoyed the pink moscato and the moscato with the pie very much, but the cabernet sauvignon was not a good pair.