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Mature farmhouse cheese and fig chutney with Sandeman Sherry Medium Sweet

On the board are thick pieces of mature farmhouse cheese with a bowl of fig chutney next to it, made of figs, onion, raisin and apple in balsamic. The medium sweet sherry sets against that a wine that stays exactly on the border between savoury and sweet.

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From the shelf

The bottle

Sandeman Sherry Medium Sweet comes from the sherry region in the south of Spain. According to our own bottle page, this wine matures in its own solera of small oak casks and the colour runs from copper amber to deep gold. According to the Consejo Regulador, medium is a blend of dry generoso wine with naturally sweet wine or with concentrated must; for the designation medium sweet the Consejo uses 45 to 115 grams of residual sugar per litre, the sweeter half of the style, at 15 to 22 percent alcohol. The bottle is 15 percent alcohol and comes in 75 centilitres.

Sandeman Sherry Medium Sweet

The combination

Why this works together

An old farmhouse cheese is a cheese made from raw milk on the farm and then matured for months to more than a year; what you get in the mouth is salty, crystalline and sharp, with the umami that comes with long maturation. Traditionally something sweet goes with it, and the chutney supplies that. The sherry then has to sit between those two extremes, and a medium sweet is made for exactly that spot: with 45 to 115 grams of residual sugar per litre it has too much sweetness to stand bare next to the cheese and too little to outdo the chutney. Taste research explains why that works: sweetness considerably lowers the threshold at which salt is perceived, and vinegar does the same, so the balsamic in the chutney and the residual sweetness in the wine together pull the salt of the cheese forward instead of covering it. What the wine itself adds is the nutty oxidative tone from the solera, which suits the matured cheese. The Consejo mentions cheese with medium.

At the table

The dish

  • For 4 people
  • Ready in 1 hour and 50 minutes for the chutney, plus four weeks of resting
  • Type cheese course

What you need

  • 400 g mature farmhouse cheese
  • 500 g fresh figs, quartered
  • 50 g onion, finely chopped
  • 40 g raisins
  • 50 g apple, in small cubes
  • 100 g sugar
  • 200 g balsamic vinegar
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • 1 clove
  • a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg
  • a quarter teaspoon of ground ginger
  • salt and pepper

How to make it

  1. Clean the figs and cut them into quarters; small ones may stay halved.
  2. Finely chop the onion and cut the apple into small cubes.
  3. Heat the sugar with the balsamic vinegar in a pan until the mixture boils.
  4. Add the onion, raisins, figs, apple, cinnamon stick, clove, nutmeg and ground ginger and season with salt and pepper.
  5. Let everything simmer gently for an hour and a half, stirring regularly, until the mixture has the thickness of jam.
  6. Spoon the chutney into clean jars with lids and leave them for four weeks before you open them.
  7. Take the cheese out of the fridge an hour before serving, cut it into thick pieces and put the chutney, at room temperature or lightly warmed, alongside.

In the glass

Serving

Serve this medium sweet at 12 to 14 degrees in a white wine glass, filled to about a third. At that temperature the residual sweetness stays noticeable without becoming heavy; much colder and the wine closes up, much warmer and the alcohol comes forward. An opened medium is patient: for blended sherry the Consejo reckons on about two months with the bottle closed and stored cool.

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