The Cheese Board Challenge

Up your board game: Judging by social media, cheese boards are the newest competitive sport. On Instagram especially, people are posting amazingly artful compositions, with rivers of berries, curls of coppa and ramekins of olives or jam. Cheese is so fun to share and what’s cheese without wine? Less fun, certainly.

At holiday time, within your friends-and-family bubble, why not try your own hand at creating a cheesy masterpiece? Perk it up with pickles, crackers, nuts, honey, dates or fresh seasonal fruit. Aim for contrasts of flavor, color, shape, pattern, and texture. To make it a virtual party, challenge your friends to do the same, then meet up virtually to show off your genius cheese-board ideas. Everybody’s a winner! Open a compatible bottle of California wine and you can chat, sip, and snack until your cheesy tableau is history.

Artisan cheeses, like fine wines, reflect the place where they are made. Landscape and climate determine which dairy animals will thrive in a region, the diversity of the pasture and that signature “taste of place.” Experts say that you can give the same recipe to four cheesemakers and you will get back four different cheeses. (In fact, three East Coast cheesemakers are exploring this theory in the so-called Cornerstone Project.) Winemakers and cheesemakers are both students of terroir, trying to decipher and then highlight the distinctive flavors of their place. No wonder both products can keep us captivated for a lifetime.