The short answer to what wine goes with a cheeseboard is that you want two bottles, not one: a dry sparkling wine for the soft, salty and creamy cheeses, and an older, savoury red for the hard and mature ones. Everything after that is refinement. A cheeseboard is the one course at Christmas that actively rewards having more than one thing open, which is either very good news or mildly dangerous, depending on your household.

Most of us treat the cheeseboard as an afterthought, a thing that arrives when the serious drinking is already done and the bottle nearest the board gets poured by default. That bottle is usually whatever heavy red survived the main course, and it is very often the wrong one. A great board deserves a moment's thought, the same thought you would give a main. It just happens to reward it more generously, because there is no single correct answer to argue about.

Why can't one wine cover a whole cheeseboard?

A cheeseboard is not one flavour. It is a committee. You have the soft and creamy, the hard and nutty, the washed-rind ones that smell like a gym bag and taste like heaven, and somewhere near the edge a blue that could strip paint. No single wine is diplomatic enough to please all of them at once. A main course gives you one dominant thing to match. A board gives you five arguments happening on the same plate. The trick is not to find a magic bottle that does everything. It is to pour two wines that each do one job beautifully, and let people wander between them. We have already made the case that whisky and cheese can outdo wine. Consider this the wine side of the ledger, and the board is where wine wins some of it back.

What wine goes with soft, creamy cheese? Start with something sparkling

If you only open one wine with cheese, make it a good dry sparkling. The reason is physics as much as pleasure. Champagne's acidity and fine bubbles scrub the palate clean between bites, and its faint bready, biscuity character is already halfway to a cracker. It handles the salty and the creamy with ease, which is most of what a British board is built on. A ripe brie or a young Comté against a glass of Ruinart R de Ruinart Brut is one of those pairings that makes a table briefly go quiet. Ruinart has been working in a Chardonnay-led style since 1729, all chalk and citrus and restraint, which is exactly the clean line a rich triple-cream needs. Think of it as a squeeze of lemon on something buttery: it does not fight the richness, it frames it.

What red wine goes with hard, aged cheese?

For the hard, aged cheeses, the ones with a crystalline crunch and years behind them, you want a red with some age and savour of its own. Not a big jammy blockbuster. Something where the fruit has softened into leather, dried cherry and woodsmoke. Aged Nebbiolo from Piedmont, the grape behind Barolo and Barbaresco, is the quiet master here. The Sorelle de Nicola Barbaresco Riserva 2014, with more than a decade behind it, has the perfume and the fine, sandy tannin that a mature Gouda or a wedge of Parmigiano will meet halfway. Give it an hour in a decanter first. The tannins soften, the aromatics open, and the whole thing starts to taste like something far dearer than it is.

What about the soft, stinky cheeses?

Washed-rind cheeses, the ones that announce themselves from across the room, are the sly ones. They are pungent on the nose but often surprisingly gentle on the palate, and a big tannic red will simply trample them. Reach instead for a lighter, perfumed red with bright acidity. A village Burgundy like the Burguet Gevrey-Chambertin Symphonie has the red-fruit lift and silk to sit beside an Epoisses or a ripe Reblochon without either one shouting the other down. Pinot Noir and soft cheese is a very old idea, and a very good one.

What wine goes with blue cheese?

Blue is the cheese that undoes most pairings, because its salt and ferocity flatten a dry wine completely. The classic answer is sweetness. A glass of something rich and honeyed, or a nutty oloroso sherry, turns the standoff into pudding. We go deep on sherry and why it is having a moment, and a wedge of Stilton is its natural partner. If you would rather stay with the reds already open, a bold, warm southern Italian like the Galardi Terra di Lavoro, all dark fruit and volcanic swagger from the hills above Naples, has the sheer weight to stand up to a blue. Not a textbook match. A very enjoyable one.

How do you serve a cheeseboard properly?

The cheese matters as much as the wine. Take the board out of the fridge a good hour before you want it, because cold mutes everything and a fridge-cold brie tastes of almost nothing. The same logic that governs serving temperature applies to the cheese as much as the wine. Serve the bottles in the order you would drink them: sparkling first, the lighter red next, the big red and the blue to finish. Give people small pours and several glasses if you can, because half the pleasure of a board is the wandering.

The last bite

The cheeseboard is the most forgiving course of the year and the most fun to drink with, precisely because there is no single right answer. Open a dry sparkling and one good red and you have covered nine cheeses out of ten. Add a sweet glass for the blue and you have covered them all. Then do the sensible thing, which is to stop worrying about the rules, cut yourself an unreasonable piece of Comté, and pour whichever of the open bottles is nearest. That, in the end, is the whole point of a board.