Chalk & Cheese

When you buy a farm, said the Roman agricultural writer Palladius, you need to look at the people who live in the area. If they seem a sturdy lot, you can invest with confidence, but if they are podgy and pasty faced (that is a free translation of the Latin), then keep away. The local people, no less than the cheese and wine they produce, are autochthonous, sprung from the local soil.

Until last week, I thought that the origin of the expression “as different as chalk and cheese” also lay in the soil—that the distinction was not between the substances themselves but between the chalk uplands of southern England, traditionally good for grazing sheep, and the region’s lush, damp valleys, where cows produce milk creamy enough to make Stilton and Cheshire. Now I find, from a quick blink at John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, that there were people as far back as the fourteenth century dim enough to confuse actual pieces of cheese with lumps of calcareous limestone. But I still prefer my own theory. The school I went to in my teens was surrounded by chalk downs, no longer sheep-runs but acres of open arable, thickly coated in nitrate of potash. Not only did that land look quite different from the little meadows in the vale a few miles to the south, but the folk who farmed it were different as well. Terroir tells.

The crumbliest, most chalk-like of English cheeses actually come not from the vales of the south but from granite country in Wales and the north, where the last Ice Age scraped the easy surface off the landscape and left what passes in Britain for mountains. Caerphilly, a sharp white cheese from Wales, hails from hills where they quarry granite that people polish and turn into kitchen counters—the sort guaranteed to shatter any wine glass dropped on it. Similarly, Wensleydale cheese is made among the northern Pennines (James Herriot territory). Not long ago, a faceless quango—“quasi-autonomous national governmental organization”—tried to close the creamery and move production to an industrial suburb of Liverpool. A management buyout prevented it and Wensleydale is still made by the strong, silent men of the Yorkshire Dales, as it has been since the twelfth century, when the Cistercian monks first came to tame this wet and gritty land.

The wine that goes best with such sharp, crumbly cheese, however, comes from the sun-dappled valley of the river Loire in western France, distinctly chalk-and-limestone country. Splendid Sauvignon Blanc like Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre has often lain in cool, dry, limestone caves. Thus cheese and chalk may in a sense bury the hatchet. Crumble some Wensleydale into a green salad, add fresh thyme from the garden, sip one of these dry white wines, and somehow the sharpnesses coalesce.

However, it is not the famous Sauvignon wines from the Loire that we celebrate this month, but rather one whose grapes grow in a land whose spectacular and complex geology defies summary description—though we saw plenty of it masquerading as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The House of Nobilo’s 2005 Sauvignon Blanc (available locally for about thirteen dollars) comes from the Marlborough region at the north end of the South Island of New Zealand. This is about as far south as Minnesota or the Rhone valley is north, that is, say, about forty-two degrees of latitude, but the Pacific Ocean makes the climate a good deal milder than ours.

The white Sauvignon grape has been grown here for a century, but it has only become big business in the last thirty years, particularly since England joined the Common Market and New Zealand had to find new markets (and sometimes new products) to replace agricultural exports, like lamb, that had previously gone to Britain. These days the price of land is rising in the Marlborough area as erstwhile pastures are turned over to grapes.

The results of all this industry are fresh, delightful, and now famous. The 2005 Nobilo has a good bright color and a good bright taste, crisp with a hint of a fizz on first acquaintance. It is not as dry as, say, Sancerre (but then the Loire is a good deal farther from the Equator); there is a roundness more reminiscent perhaps of kiwi fruit than of anything citrus. Drink it at lunchtime with a summer salad (don’t forget the cheese) and it will put a spring into your afternoon.