by Karina Roe
This week we travel back in time to revisit one of our all-time favorite Pairing cheeses: Marcel Petite Comté. This legendary cheese hails from the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region, a large region in eastern France that encompasses not only some of France’s finest cheeses, but also some of the country’s most heralded wines. Marcel Petite ages his wheels of comté in a defunct military bunker that was cut into the side of one of the Jura’s famed limestone hills. This is the perfect setting to age comté: the cool, steady temperatures of the bunker provide an ideal environment for the slow maturation and complex flavor development that we love so much in this cheese.
But there’s nothing Petite about this Pairing! We matched it up with the mellow, silky tones of the Domaine Carrette Saint-Véran ‘Les Mures’. The nutty notes in the comté melt into the creamy butterscotch flavors of the wine, and a cleansing acidity comes through on the finish to get you geared up for the next bite. This 100% Chardonnay comes wholly from the Les Mures vineyard, allowing the Carrette family to showcase a singular terroir that features clay-limestone soils (perfect for Chardonnay) on steep, north-facing slopes. Oak is used judiciously, so as not to cover up the beautiful fruit and mineral notes that already make this wine sing.