Cheese and wine have always been regarded as a match made in heaven. Port with Stilton was an age old end of dinner ritual in the UK (relegated to the C- word time of year, at best, now) and whilst it is perceived (wrongly in many instances) that red wine always goes with cheese, I often to gravitate to whites or sweet wines.

I, for instance, think brie style cheeses and dry riesling is a fine pairing (actually riesling in its various guises goes with pretty much all cheeses), as is a Aszu Essencia Tokaji or a sweet Pedro Ximenez with a Cabrales (need the super sweet of those wines to counteracting the searing acidity of that cheese).

I’m not discounting the reds, with unsurprisingly rioja working a treat with hard cheeses, like an aged manchego, and chianti being a safe bet with the likes of aged parmesan, but I think potentially more fun can be had pairing white wines with cheese.

On the wine and cheese theme, the expansion of Ty Caws (Welsh and wider British cheesemonger extrordinaire) from online retailer to bricks and mortar shop to a cheese bar selling not only cheese to take out but cheese and wines (and charcuterie) combos to eat in certainly piqued my interest and a day off to celebrate the ending of the financial year/start of a new one for my business brought a rare foray (with Mrs. SF – who wanted to do a bit of shopping) into Cardiff city centre.

My joy at my financial year end (the hamster wheel needing to”Reeves” up to a faster speed for the next year, so as to merely stay standing still), and being able to pay myself again, was somewhat tempered by the thought of the myriad of documents I need to now send to my accountant and the current resident of  11 Downing Street who seems to think small business owners, like me, are evil incarnate (to them we are all seemingly “non working“, evil, dark satanic mill owners/robber barons) and that we should be punished accordingly.

I have, however, got off relatively lightly compared to the poor buggers trying to run any form of hospitality business,

with @the_wilderness having an interesting survey going for hospitality at : https://scoops.bot/a30f7922-927d-4fb7-ad79-549807f18a47

The hospitality industry was already in pretty dire straits and the announced measures seem to be the fiscal equivalent of a kick in the nuts after the covid, cost of living and energy price sucker punches. If hospitality withers on the vine, so do our high streets and with that comes a massive reduction in quality of life as cities and town centres slowly die. Who wants to live or visit a concrete desert devoid of anywhere decent to go out and eat and drink in?

Anyhow, rant over and back to the Ty Caws Cheese Bar, which on the face of it is exactly the sort of place I want to eat and drink in.

Nice space, I thought, with both space inside and semi outside in the arcade

and the idea is a great one (in my view).

I mean, who doesn’t like good cheese, good charcuterie and good wine and especially all of them together. Also, there is no pesky need to cook anything. At worst, you need a prep area, a fridge, a slicer and a sharp knife/cheese wire.

Of course, the pairings have to be good, with quality produce and decent (not necessarily the same as expensive) wines to match. Far too many cheese and wine events l have attended have been marred by placky sh#te cheese/or poor wines and/or inconceived pairing and often all 3 of these failings.

With the food, we were always going to be in safe hands here (they are my  cheesemongers of choice) and this was confirmed by the rather fine menu, with the ability to leave them to make the choices

or a build you own option

With the food, there is a good selection of wines, with not uninteresting reds (don’t see Grignolino on many lists over here)

whites,

rosè, fizz

and fortified and generoso wines

I was instantly drawn to the Pork Bigod, a combo (£12) of the finest sort to my mind and we decided to keep it local on the cheese front with the Welsh cheese plate (£18)

The rilletes and Baron Bigod (my dyspraxic brain always see this a Baron Bigot, a relative no doubt of Charles Boycott) were absolutely bod on.

Rich creamy Baron Bigod (a king amongst cheeses rather than a mere baron) worked an absolute treat with nicely seasoned fatty rillettes. Sharp balsamic onions and cornichons operated to offset the rich fattiness, with a good thwack of acidity.

I paired this with grignoloni (a Italian wine, from the North in the form of Piedmont,  which I am not that familiar with), with wines from this grape supposedly reminiscent of gamey (£7 a glass and £28 a bottle).

Strawberry, with a touch of gaminess and a pretty high level of acidity, this worked quite well with the rillettes and the Baron.

Mrs. SF has the Hacienda Grimon rioja crianza (£6.5 a glass and £24 a bottle).

which is a good all-rounder. Nice fruit and touch of vanilla oak, but not too much.

Next up was the Welsh cheese plate (£18)

Nice mix this, with a good, midly acidic, blue (Trefardwyn), a mellow, soft creamy, number (Butty Bach, a replacement for the advertised Hiraeth), a nutty hard cheese (Hafod) and a buttery rind washed cheese (Celtic Promise).  Again, a welcome shot of acidity was provided by cornichons and balsamic onions. Good portion of quality Cradoc’s sea salt crackers came with this.

My only real complaint here was the bread that came with the Pork Bigod.

I just don’t think sourdough works that well, with it propensity to be dotted with large air holes, with well anything! Made spreading the good butter (nice level of saltiness) and soft cheeses very tricky.  A standard baguette would have worked much better to my mind. In any event there wasn’t really enough of it.

I paired this with a Delegado Zuleta amontillado (£5 –  hooray for it being a proper 125 ml pour, boo for it coming in a copa glass which I replaced with a normal glass  –  and £26 a bottle )

which was a fair bit sweeter than (and didn’t look much like) a standard amontillado. To me, the colour, aroma and taste of this wine pointed to something sweeter in the mix (moscatel and/or pedro ximenez) rather than a pure palamino amontillado.

The nuttiness with a shot of raisiny sweetness worked well with the blue, but was a bit too much for the other cheeses. As such, I think the description here is perhaps a tad misleading

as this was to me a sweet wine (and tasted more like a cream sherry to my unrefined palate).

I, therefore, ordered a white in the form of the percorino (£7.5 a glass and £30 a bottle) on the list. What I got was perfectly nice, but if I had tasted it blind I would have bet my house that it was a sauvingon blanc

Classic passionfruit (cat pee) notes made it  quite different from the more lemony and floral notes I tend to associate with a pecorino.

No matter, as it worked fine with the non blue cheeses, particularly the Butty Bach 

Because Mrs. SF and I are piggies and we were having a rather jolly time, we decided to order the charcuterie plate (£12).

Really good charcuterie here from Baker’s Pig, with a speck, coppa and, the star of the show, a nicely fatty and spicy salami.

I ordered a glass of the carignan (£6 for a glass, £22 for the bottle),

which was rich with black bramble fruit (but pleasingly not too boozy). Perhaps lacking that lick of acidity needed as against the fatty pork of the charcuterie, I still rather enjoyed it.

The verdict

We went large, both on the food and wine front, but I think the offering here is pretty good value. £12 for the Pork Bigod (Baron Bigot, pork rillettes, balsamic onions, cornichons and bread and butter) was a particular bargain.

The excellent offering of cheese and charcuterie, as well as a decent wine offering, make this a great addition to Cardiff’s food and drink scene.

Wine pricing seems to me to be pretty reasonable, with mark ups applied more than fair. By way of example, the Hacienda Grimon Rioja retails at around the £15.95 a bottle and is a mere £24 here and the Rhosyn Rose fizz, from Velfry, retails at £42 and is a mere £55 on the list here. These are very reasonable mark ups for the UK and should be applauded.

I do have a couple of purely my wish list suggestions/points, which are as follows:

• The list would benefit from a riesling on it – the perfect wine, to my mind, for this sort of food;
• The description of each of the wines could usefully include a recommendation as to what cheese/charcuterie it best pairs with;
• Some of the wine descriptions are a bit off, most notably the ” it’s not sherry” Alvear CB fino and the amontillado (dry is not a descriptor I would have used, even in medium dry context, for that wine);
• Maybe offer a carafe size option for the wines;
• I would serve the sherry and generoso wine in standard wine glasses rather than copas.
• I would bin the sourdough baguette and replace it with a less holey style of bread.

We couldn’t resist picking up some cheese from the rather fulsome counter

with some of the, other worldly good, Baron Bigod and the Trefardwyn Welsh blue.

In summary, just my sort of place and it was nice to see it packed out on a Friday lunchtime.

I hope they are added to the Cardiff Wine Passport 2025 roster, as that would indeed be a perfect pairing!

The details

Address:  28 Castle Arcade, Cardiff, CF10 1BW

Website: https://www.tycaws.com/cheese-bar

Opening hours: