When your 8-year-old son suddenly starts thumping your belly gleefully like a bongo drum, chances are it means you've put on some weight. I confess that I've added 2-3 kg to my 190-cm frame since arriving more than a year ago in Belgium, a gastronomic paradise blessed with a tremendous variety of wines, overwhelmingly imported, and superb Belgian and imported cheeses.

Just moments ago, while carving a few slices of very old gouda, I was stricken with guilt again about my cheese consumption. But weight gain is a small price to pay for such a sublime indulgence. What a fantastic food cheese is, the more so because it's so at home with its soul mate, wine.

A French wine-world saying goes, "Buy on apples, sell on cheese." That does not mean, as an old friend of mine once errantly concluded, that wine goes well with fruit. Some wines do; that's not the point. "Buy on apples, sell on cheese" refers to the buyer's advantage when tasting wine with an apple, an acidic and unhappy marriage that puts the buyer at an advantage vis-a-vis the wine seller. Conversely, when wine and cheese are properly paired the advantage belongs to the wine merchant, since the cheese will enhance the wine's virtues, even if they be modest. As a rule, this is absolutely true.