Cheese: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Best
by Max McCalman, David Gibbons
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Book Summary Information
Author: David Gibbons, Max McCalmanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-30
ISBN: 1400050340
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Book Reviews of Cheese: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Best
Book Review: Cheese graded on a 100 point scale? NO!
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a useful reference guide, with good advice about selection, caring for your cheese purchases, ideas for matching with wine and combining for a cheese plate. Where McCalman runs off the rails is the dreaded 100 point scale. This is a silly exercise when applied to wine -- it is ludicrous when applied to cheese. On what basis is Laguiole a "91 point quality" cheese; Rogue River blue a 93 pointer, Humboldt Fog a 75 pointer; Pecorino Toscano 81 points; Soumaintrain an 80 pointer; Selles sur Cher is an 89. To begin with, every one of these cheeses will vary wildly. A particular piece of Soumaintrain may be fabulous or fabulously boring -- and ditto any other cheese. Spend ten days in France, for example, and after the dinner cheese cart has come and gone ten times you will have learned, if nothing else, that every cheese will be different from restaurant to restaurant and from one night of the week to the next.
Furthermore, these "quality ratings" seem to reflect nothing more or less than McCalman's personal preferences or a particularly wonderful example of cheese X he may have stumbled across at some point. How else would Gouda, a wildly variable cheese that appears in a wide range from dull uninspired commercial to mature and complex farmhouse forms, merit a "96" without further elaboration, while Brin d'Amour, potentially fabulous stuff, pulls an 80, Chaource a 74? A good piece of Sbrinz is a smash with old Bordeaux -- but is it really a "99 point cheese"? I have no idea what the basis for these "quality scores" might be -- and unless I missed it, the book doesn't explain the scoring method either. Even if it did, that would not make the practice any more justifiable.
I can see it now. Just as there are those who fill their wine cellars strictly by the numbers, who will buy nothing but WS or WA "90 point and up" wines and refuse to look at anything at 89 and points south, there will be folks who will not touch any cheese rated under 90 -- and who will also put anything on a platter that scores 90 or over, no matter how terrific or abysmal the reality of the cheese in front of them may be. Rather than develop their own sense and sensibility about cheese (or anything else), they will color by numbers, encouraged by the likes of Robert Parker and now Max McCalman. "Parker gave the wine a 92 and McCalman says this cheese is a 96" -- "the wine" being some flaccid oak chipped, micro-oxygenated, acid and alcohol adjusted Australian shiraz and "this cheese" being a low fat, underripe, spongy and bland Gouda bought in a plastic vacuum pack at the corner Jiffy Mart.
The 100 point scoring thing is utter stuff and nonsense -- a holdover from grade school. While McCalman has done much to get Americans to start paying attention to cheese -- the endpapers call him "the unofficial spokesperson for fine cheese in the United States" -- his use of the 100 point scale here does a terrible disservice to the cause of fine cheese and to the readers of this book.
Buy the book, IGNORE THE SCORES.
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