Chef-Sommelier Melissa L. Smith Talks Wine and Cheese

Melissa L. Smith is a Culinary Institute of America grad and Court of Master Sommeliers-certified wine sommelier. She has worked as a fine-dining chef around the world, from a Relais & Châteaux dude ranch in Montana to the former Four Seasons Chinzanso in Tokyo to the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley. Through Enotrias, her wine appraisal and education business, Smith said she has evaluated the cellars of tech titans, venture capital mavens and world-renowned surgeons — none of whose names can she divulge.

As reported earlier this year by the New York Times, Smith, 45, and her husband, Monte Harhouri, decided to leave Smith’s native California for a life that’s more pastoral and less prone to natural disaster. After a lengthy search, the couple landed on a four-acre property in Pittsford with a brick house dating back to 1832. They plan to host farm-to-table events and wellness retreats there.

On Saturday, June 21, at 2:30 p.m., the newly minted Vermonter will cohost a wine-and-cheese pairing seminar at the 14th annual Burlington Wine & Food festival with Zoe Brickley of Greensboro’s Jasper Hill Farm.

Seven Days asked Smith about traditional and unexpected wine and cheese pairings — and learned why not to drink wine with dessert.

Why do you believe wine and cheese make a natural pairing?

The simplicity of the ingredients that go into them and the resulting complexity of those minimal ingredients. With wine, you’re essentially looking at grapes and yeast, and with cheese, you’re looking at dairy and bacteria — and [with both], just altering those two things with the environment or the aging vessel. All of that makes it so similar but also so complex and so difficult to do a true pairing.

Can you share a traditional pairing and why it works?

Blue cheese and port. There are subtle tannins in port that help to combat the creaminess of a blue cheese, but the pungency of a blue cheese matches the strength of the port — not only the flavor but the alcohol as well. Inventorying people’s wine collections, [I’ve seen that] nobody actually drinks their ports and their dessert wines. So for me, it’s an extra excuse to open that bottle of port, not to just have it sitting in your wine cellar.

I’m the anti-wine-and-dessert person. It doesn’t make sense, more often than not, because you’re constantly competing with sweetness levels in order to make a proper pairing. The dessert can’t be sweeter than the wine, because that makes the wine taste bitter, and the wine can’t taste sweeter than the dessert or it washes out all of the flavors of the dessert. It makes much more sense to pair a wine with cheese [for a final course].

How about an unexpected pairing?

Zinfandel and [Jasper Hill Farm] Harbison, because it’s got that bacony flavor since it’s wrapped in spruce bark. A chilled zinfandel and barbecue pair perfectly. Chilling a red wine might be kind of a surprising take on things, [but] wines that have minimal tannins and are fruit-forward are fantastic chilled. With a delicious aged Harbison with all that funk on it, it’s just a really fun pairing.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.

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