Next time you're wine or cheese tasting, take a moment to listen to your fellow tasters. No doubt you'll hear someone describe a cheese as strong that you find almost bland. Or you'll taste a tang where others taste sweet, or a few will talk about a slightly bitter finish, while others have bewildered looks. That's because everyone tastes things differently.

Wine and cheese have enormous ranges of aromas and flavors, some bold and others subtle. The fun thing about pairing wine and cheese is that they can work together to bring subtle flavors to the forefront, thereby opening up an entirely new world of aroma and taste. By focusing on the elements of wine and cheese that work together, the ones that provide each other the right balance, you'll find ways to open up these heady doors. When pairing wine and cheese:

• Match the body.

• Pair the complexity.

• Balance the primary flavors.

When wine and cheese are balanced, they both finish well. That is, you won't detect any bitterness, or too much saltiness, or those strange off tastes at the end.

Match the Body

The body (as opposed to the moisture) of cheese is made up of protein and fat, with fat providing a lot of the texture. This texture translates to mouthfeel. A high-fat cheese coats your mouth with a buttery mouthfeel. It's a little heavy and possibly creamy. A cheese lower in fat is lighter on your palate, coming and going more quickly, and generally has a cleaner, quicker mouthfeel.

The body of wine is largely determined by the amount of alcohol it has. The lower the alcohol content, the thinner the body. The higher the alcohol content, the fuller the body.

Sometimes body is referred to as viscosity, which is a nice way to think about it because one way to guess if wine has low, medium, or high alcohol, is to swirl it in your glass and watch how it coats the glass. Viscous wines will leave a swirl of wine around the inside of a glass that then falls slowly. Wines without much viscosity will fall so fast you can't see them.

When matching cheese and wine, one of the first things to think about is matching the fat and alcohol content, which is really just a matter of common sense. Alcohol feels viscous in the mouth and leaves a warm sensation behind, and high alcohol has a way of overpowering food, so high-alcohol wines generally pair better with heavy, robust meals because they don't overpower the food. That's why you often see high alcohol reds like Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah paired with steak.

With cheese it's the same thing. The cheeses best able to stand up to high levels of alcohol are the ones that are heaviest in body, that is, the heaviest in fat. Fat coats your mouth much as alcohol does, and the two, the fat and alcohol, are enough of a contrast to work quite well together. So before you think about aromas, flavors, and gentle nuances, think first about pairing moist, young cheeses (which are generally lower in fat) with low-alcohol wines, and drier, older cheeses (which are generally higher in fat) with higher-alcohol wines.

Pair the Complexity

Not all cheeses are created equal. Some are very simple and straightforward. Their aroma matches their flavor, you get both immediately, and nothing's left behind. Others are as complicated as directions to your best friend's beach house. In the case of the house, you start out thinking you know the way and what it will be like, but as the road winds through turn after turn you question all your assumptions, and when you get there, hopefully, it takes your breath away.

Complex cheese, complicated directions, or fine wine; it's all the same. They start out one way, transform into something else, and then become something you never expected. And just as you wouldn't want to cut a good journey short, you don't want to cut a cheese or wine short, and that's just what happens if you pair a simple cheese with a complex wine or a complex cheese with a simple wine. The complex taste will be cut short by the simpler taste. Instead, match cheese and wine complexities, and together they'll reveal the magic of the unexpected.

Balance the Primary Flavors

Avoid pairing tannin (the bitter chemical compounds found in grape skins and seeds) and salt. Have you ever eaten Brie while drinking a robust red wine? Did it leave you with the taste of rubbery burned mushrooms and the desire to rinse your mouth with clean, cool water? This is because robust red wines are high in tannin, and Brie is high in salt. Together these two collide. The two will never balance each other out.

Pair cheese with high-acid wine. Wine's sweetness comes from the natural sugar of grapes. However, when the grapes are fermented, yeast converts a lot of this sugar into alcohol, making the wine less sweet. That means sweet wines are lower in alcohol, and high-alcohol wines are more acidic. In wine terms this translates from acidic to sweet as follows: bone dry, dry, medium dry, medium sweet, sweet, or very sweet.

Different types of wines need different balances between acidic and sweet to achieve their best flavors. Bone-dry wines are often crisp and refreshing, and very sweet wines almost fall away from the concept of wine. In wine terms, a wine with too little acid is called flabby.

Acidity is tasted just inside the outer edges of your tongue, and acidity makes your mouth water. The salt and sweet of cheese almost always partner well with acidic flavors in wine. The acidity will open your palate and make sweet and salty flavors rounder and fuller. So when you have a wine high in acidity, bring out the cheese.

What to do with a bitter wine: As far as salt and bitterness go, these two flavors, with a few notable exceptions, are rarely found in wine. Sherry is salty, making it an interesting cheese partner (more on that later). And some Italian wines (Brunello di Montalcino, Barolo, and Barbaresco) are made more interesting by a hint of bitterness at the end. When pairing these wines you simply have to be careful to avoid cheeses with any bitterness; otherwise the two tip the scale of bitterness from interesting to unappealing.