Mark your calendar: the Webinar on Cheese & Cider Pairing runs later this month, and it's a free session open to all members. We're posting the preview a little early this year, mostly because a few members told us last time that they wished they'd had more than a couple of days' notice to clear an hour on the calendar for a session they wanted to attend.
Why cider, and why now
If your tasting flights and case signage default to wine, you're not alone — it's the pairing most retail counters reach for first, and for good reason, since a lot of customers already have some intuition for it. Cider is a different kind of opportunity. It brings acidity and effervescence to the table the way a sparkling wine does, but at a price point and a regional-producer story that resonates with a different slice of your customer base, especially anyone leaning into a "local first" case layout this spring.
There's also a practical staffing angle worth naming. Not every counter person is comfortable recommending a wine, either because they don't drink much of it themselves or because the vocabulary feels borrowed from a different trade. Cider's newer to a lot of specialty counters, which means nobody on your team has to pretend they've had a decade of exposure to it. A staffer who's uncertain about a Burgundy can still walk a customer confidently through a semi-dry cider and a sharp cheddar, and that confidence tends to show up in what actually gets sold at the register.
The session will work through the pairing logic rather than just handing out a list. Two of the ideas we expect to come up: matching intensity so a sharp, funky cider doesn't get flattened by a delicate cheese, and using contrast on purpose — a sweeter cider next to something assertive like a blue, so each one cuts the other instead of competing with it. A crumbly aged cheddar next to a drier, fruit-forward cider is the kind of straightforward starting pairing the session will use to build from, before getting into less obvious combinations like a washed-rind wheel next to something funkier and barrel-aged.
What to bring, and who this is for
You don't need a cider background to get value out of this one. It's aimed squarely at retail and counter staff who want a second beverage category to talk about confidently, plus anyone building tasting-flight programming for spring events. If you took Building a Tasting Vocabulary last year, this session is a natural next step — a lot of the same "describe what you're actually tasting" skills apply, just pointed at a different glass. Bring whatever cider you already carry, if any, and a couple of cheeses from your current case; the session works best when you're testing the ideas against your own inventory rather than an imagined one.
Registration is open now through the member portal, and it's virtual, so there's no travel to plan around. If you can't make the live session, a recording goes up afterward for members who registered, so signing up ahead of time is still worth doing even if your schedule is uncertain. One member who's run a wine-and-cheese program at her counter for years put it to us this way when we mentioned the topic on a recent call: "I've been meaning to build out a cider list for two seasons and kept not doing it because I didn't trust my own pairing instincts yet. An hour of someone else doing the thinking first is exactly what gets me over that."
If pairing programming is new territory for your counter, the Events Committee can also point you toward members who've already built one from scratch and are usually happy to compare notes on what sold and what sat on the shelf.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.