We found a fellow WineAndCheese lover here in Quebradas, Costa Rica! Her name is Carol and she lives right down the road from us. Since she’s an expat, we can speak English, which makes it a little easier! We had already gotten together for wine and cheese before so I wanted to do it again as part of WineAndCheeseFriday. Also having some in-person time provided a nice break from all our Christmas video chatting.
This was our second time visiting the specialty grocery store, L'épicerie, in Ojochal. We had such good luck with wine and cheese we purchased from there a few months back that we had to plan another trip! (https://wineandcheesefriday.com/best-of-wines-and-cheeses-in-costa-rica/) As we entered we had wine and cheese on the mind. What would we find this time around? Would there be more wines from other countries that our local distributors don’t carry? And what kind of cheese would we find?
Maria takes to the airwaves with her first podcast! Lori Budd invited Maria to be interviewed on Allure of the Pour in celebration of Cheese Day. Wait you didn’t know Cheese Day happens every year on June 4? Well check out our podcast to see what else you might learn about cheese!
We love the farmer’s market here in Perez Zeledon, Costa Rica. They call it the Feria and it’s the size of a soccer stadium, so there’s no surprise that we visit every week. One week while we were picking up our salad supplies and giant collection of vegetables, we walked past a table with mini bottles of wine. Since they were small, we could get a couple and not commit to a standard sized bottle of wine. Ok I’m in!
We heard about this wine during one of our previous trips to Costa Rica but couldn’t find it until this year. The wine is made from cashews and we really thought hard about how a wine could be made from nuts. We were telling someone about it and they said “Oh silly, the wine is made from the fruit, not the nut!” Did you know cashew was a fruit?? Just shortly after finding the wine in one of our local licorerias (liquor stores) we came across the fruit in the farmer’s market. We told the farmer that we’d be tasting the wine soon so he gave us one of the fruits to taste too.
When we have visited Costa Rica in the past, we noticed that most of the cheese here falls into the “fresh category” but never really put much thought into why that might be. We usually just chalked it up to which foods are popular here and that a wedge of hard, funky cheese didn’t really fit in. Once we discovered the Monte Azul brand of cheese as something more relatable to our palates and one that was possible to pair with wine, we found out the information we had been missing. Cheese is different in Costa Rica for good reason! It just so happened that Monte Azul was near where we were staying so we arranged for a visit there. Our entry will share the things we learned that day.