While wine sommeliers are nothing new, could milk sommeliers ever catch on?

The 5pm Dining blog has covered tea sommeliers and, almost unbelievably, water sommeliers do exist.

But could milk sommeliers become a thing?

Obviously, the short answer is no. Or at least not in the conventional sense.

I can confidently predict that no restaurant will ever employ a milk sommelier to advise diners on which milk will best accompany their foie gras, fish ‘n’ chips or steak pie.

However, different milks do have different tastes which experts can pick out and identify.

The 5pm Dining blog was recently invited to a milk tasting event hosted by Graham’s Family Dairy and their newly appointed milk sommelier Doug Wood.

Tongue in cheek

Before we go any further, yes, we all know that the idea of a milk sommelier is ridiculous. And this entire exercise had a tongue in cheek element.

However, it is perhaps not quite as daft as it sounds initially.

Doug is better known as the man behind the WoodWinters wine merchants. They supply wine to restaurants such as Gleneagles and Six by Nico.

For the last fifteen years or so, Doug has spent a fair amount of time crafting tasting notes for different wines.

More recently, he has put his olfactory senses to work devising tasting notes for five types of the Graham’s milk range.

For example, Doug has detected notes of grassiness in the Semi-Skimmed and vanilla, toasted nuts and bready aromas in their Gold Smooth milk.

Matching milk with food

Along with several other bloggers, we were invited to taste five different Graham’s Dairy milks, all paired with food ranging from spicy venison and harissa pastillas to chocolate cookies.

I’ll be honest. On the nose, I struggled to sense anything other than the slight lactic sourness that all milk has.

Apart from a little grassiness and some sweetness, I also struggled to put my finger on any distinctive flavours other than the unhelpful ‘milk’.

Perhaps my palate is rather blunt but I didn’t get the fragrant buttermilk or the white flowers which Doug found in the Organic Semi-Skimmed or the panna cotta he got in the Organic Whole with Cream at the Top.

Much more definitive was the way in which the different fat contents of the various milks affected their texture in the mouth.

Obviously, the milks with a higher fat content had a smoother, more velvety consistency than the semi -skimmed varieties.

What did the capture the attention was the counterintuitive way which the milk worked with food.

Conventional wisdom has it that lightly acidic or sparkling liquids make the best palate cleansers.

Milk, with its tongue-coating suspended fats, should act as the opposite of a palate cleanser.

But that is not what we found.

Semi-skimmed milk was an excellent palate cleanser for sticky haggis bon bons. Organic Whole with Cream at the Top was very effective at neutralising the spice in venison and harissa pastillas.

Milk also paired well with different foods.

The velvety mouth feel of Gold Smooth, a milk in which the fat has been homogenised or spread through the milk, was also a brilliant foil to the fruity acidity of apple and blackberry crumble.

Much in the same way that custard is.

And, of course, milk paired beautifully with a freshly baked chocolate cookie.

No milk sommelier job for me

While this blogger pretty much drew a blank on picking up a range of flavours in different milks, I am more open to the idea of having a glass of milk with my dinner.

Something I don’t think I have done since I was a kid.

I’m not saying that I’m never going to reach for the red wine when faced with a juicy steak.

But I may well reach for the red-topped Semi-Skimmed carton when there is an apple crumble in front of me.