Just in case you needed another excuse to forego an actual attempt at cooking for another night of taking a cheese wheel to the face, French researchers at the Centre for Taste and Feeding Behavior (side note: where do I sign up for that?) confirm that cheese actually makes wine taste better, therefore justifying every Friday night I've had in my adult life. After 31 lucky participants basically lived the dream of eating various cheeses and wines in the researchers' study, research revealed that snacking on cheese improves both the taste of red and white wines. In the words of any #basic twenty- and thirtysomething woman: "Uh, duh."
The 31 participants, all "wine buffs," according to The Telegraph, tried various wines and cheeses in the study and found across the board that the tastes of the wines improved after sampling the cheeses. They first tried three sips of each wine without the cheese, then three sips of wine after the cheese, and were asked to describe the taste. According to the results, published in the Journal of Food Science, every one of the four types of cheeses improved the standard of the wines that were consumed afterward.
In other news, I am quitting my human life and moving to France to become someone who gets paid to eat wine and cheese and talk about it for #science.
While the research shows that the type of cheese doesn't affect whether or not the wine will taste good (essentially confirming that wine and cheese night is the free-for-all we always treated it as), some people do prefer to pair their wines and cheeses. For some advice on that, look no further than this handy wine and cheese pairing infographic from Fix.com.
Of course, at the end of the day, the heart wants what it wants — and if the heart wants to eat shaved parmesan straight out of the plastic container from Whole Foods while dancing in their underwear to "Caviar, Myanmar/Mid-sized car/You don't have to be popu-lar/Find out who your true friends are/Pinot Noir/In the boudoir," then you are only human and must obey.
A previous version of this article stated that cheese made cheap wine taste better; this article has been updated to reflect that cheap wines were not used in this study.
Images: Kristine Weilert/Stocksy; Giphy; Fix.com
