Tonight I am alone, so I choose to dine on one of my favourite combinations: bread and cheese. I'm a relatively recent convert to cheese, but now I love it, confirming the notion that tastes that are hard to acquire are often more enduring than those we appreciate immediately.

Tonight I am eating Comte and Colton Basset Stilton with a bread I made earlier: I bunged in a bit of olive oil, some salt, a little sugar and some flour with dried yeast. I mixed it with some warm water and allowed it to prove (temperature in kitchen 27 centigrade today, as it has been for at least two weeks) while still quite a damp mix. Unfortunately, my rough and ready estimations mean the bread has turned out quite salty to the taste, but this means it goes quite well with the cheese.

Two New Zealand Rieslings provide the accompaniment. Both are very good. Waipara Springs Riesling 2004 Waipara, New Zealand is drier with lovely limey fruit, together with just a hint of sweetness. There's also some flinty minerality (reduction?). It's pretty dry though, with bracing acidity, and drier than most NZ Rieslings tend to be. Framinghams's Marlborough Classic Riesling 2005 is richer and thicker with some residual sugar providing the weight and richness that helps offset the high acidity. Both work really well with cheese.