Wine and Cheese Map: Cheers to Statistical Analysis!

Recommended wine pairings with Parmigian-Reggiano.

Screen shot of the dataset. Red wines are on the left, white wines on the right and the cheeses are the yellow dots.

Clicking on any wine or cheese results in a local cluster.

Users can add filters such as cheese characteristics or country of origin.

At last, statistical analysis that requires the drinking of wine and the consuming of cheese.

A team of molecular biologists and computer scientists from the University of Toronto founded wineandcheesemap.com, a website and app that feature nearly 1,000 wine and cheese pairings.

On CBC Radio’s Toronto morning program, Metro Morning, Prof. Gary Bader explained

The app helps you identify cheeses that you might not know about and wines that you might not know about and how they go together. It’s perfect for planning a party.

Basically, you can search for a red wine or a white wine, click on it, it will show you a network of relationships, kind of like a spider web of connections. Click on a cheese and it will show you red and white wines that connect to it,” he said.

Or if you click on a wine, like Beaujolais, it will tell you that it’s really nice with cheddar or specific types of Swiss cheeses.

In his CBC interview Bader said

he wanted to show off some fun applications for the technology, but it was his wife who had an “aha moment,” as he called it, while reading the book “Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best” by Max McCalman and David Gibbons.

His wife pointed out that the information in the book is essentially a data set that could be plugged in to Cytoscape.

The Washington Post also carried the story. No wonder; there’ll be much wine consumption down there over the next 4 years.