Actually not cheese. As much as cheese is my favourite thing ever, possible more exciting. Here is a tale of a grape variety I’ve never had before.

Our story starts on new years eve. We were perusing a local (fancy-pants) supermarket, in the hope of some better quality cheese (local deli was closed, boo!) and a bottle of fizz. We were drastically let down by the cheese selection – while wandering the wine, we came across a bottle with ‘Pecorino’ written on it in warm, friendly lettering and a picture of some slightly sinister looking sheep. The combination of pecorino being Lovely Girlfriend’s favourite cheese and it being six quid, we thought we’d give it a go. It turned out to not just be a bottle of wine named after the cheese, but an entire grape variety also called Pecorino, which I’d never even heard of. Exciting!

Fast forward to yesterday evening.

What goes with a pizza bianca? Italian white wine, of course. After completely failing to light my new wood-fired pizza oven (stupid wood fired pizza oven – or possibly stupid lack of a blow-torch or any barbecue lighter fluid), and resorting to the regular oven, I definitely needed a glass of wine with dinner. So we opened the Pecorino.

First sniff and it smelled a lot like a pinot griggio. It was fresh and zingy, but with potentially not much else there. Wrong. It was actually much richer and more minerally than that. It had other words that people to describe wine too! I’ve just gotten the bottle out of the recycling to check, and it says ‘full bodied with good structure, lingering with mineral notes’ so we’re pretty much in agreement. It went really well with the salty, cheesey, no tomato-y pizza.

Turns out Pecorino is as good at being a wine as it is being a cheese. Yay.