Torrontés Tasting Flight, Quebradas, Costa Rica

We told you about how much fun we had creating our first home wine tasting so we decided to do another. The wines actually all came from the same distributor in San Jose, CR. It was so much fun to purchase an entire case of new wines to taste! Today’s set of wines are all 2017 Torrontés wines from Argentina. We’ve only tried one or two bottles of this grape before this tasting so we figured it would be interesting to try a few different brands side by side. Do you ever try varietal specific tastings? Let’s see how ours turns out! Read More…

Celebrating Rosé Day with a Provence Rosé and a Lavender Cheese

This wine and cheese pairing began with a cheese. We first tasted the lavender goats’ milk gouda cheese in the Amsterdam Cheese and Liquor Store in Sint Maarten. They surprised us by mentioning that Gouda cheese can be stored for up to 6 weeks unrefrigerated since it is a hard cheese. That was all we needed to hear; we purchased multiple wedges of Gouda cheese to bring back to the US with us. The lavender cheese would be used in a future pairing and the rest would be souvenirs for family. Yeah, we consider cheese a souvenir ? Read More…

Happy Chardonnay Day

In order to celebrate Chardonnay Day today, I’ve looked through past WineAndCheeseFriday entries to find those featuring Chardonnay. All of you Chardonnay Lovers out there will be excited to see that we’ve written many entries featuring this grape. We even went as far as creating “Chardon-May” last year and had a month long celebration of this popular white wine. Read More…

Last night at Steve and Alexandra’s, Chicago, Illinois

We wrapped up our trip to Chicago by having a bit of an impromptu dinner party with about six people. We had been gathering up some goodies while we made our way around town going from wine shop to wine shop and of course, cheese shops too. Now it was time to try them all out. Read More…

Tacama Wine Tasting, Ica Valley, Peru

Have you ever tried wine from Peru? Today we’ll be featuring three wines from Tacama Winery, the oldest winery in South America. It was founded in 1540 and still continues to produce wines almost 500 years later. The vineyards are located in the Ica Valley Oasis, which boasts hot days and cool nights and can be found in the southern part of Peru. This growing region, as well as any wine from Peru, is new to us. Did you know they started producing wine in Peru long before Chile or Argentina? These are the countries we usually think of for South American wines. Read More…

Copa Vino de Marañón y Mozzarella Cheese

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. Read More…

Grilled Cheese Day

posted last year on our Facebook Fan Page

Today is Grilled Cheese Day so I searched online for the best place in Durham, NC to get a grilled cheese. Once I confirmed that we could turn them into gluten free treats, we chose Toast Paninoteca. Read More…

Wine and Chocolate Pairing, Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

Did you know there’s a region in Costa Rica that grows chocolate? We just found out about it on a recent trip to Puerto Viejo. We were pleasantly surprised to find a chocolate and wine pairing at Cho.co. The store was set up with all different chocolates and bars decorating the walls. I think there might have been ten different chocolate producers sold in the store. We visited on a Friday night and boy was it packed. People were excited to try their chocolate tastings, beer, coffee and wine pairings. Luckily, there was still some space at the bar so we found a spot there and began our tasting! Read More…

Zinfandel/Tannat with a Goat Cheese Log and Aged Gouda

We purchased this bottle of wine during our visit to Brecon Estate back in the Fall, https://wineandcheesefriday.com/brecon-estate-paso-robles-ca/. We visited the winery during our Paso Robles Wine Tasting Extravaganza day. That was our first time trying a Tannat wine and we even got to pair it with cheese that day. We liked it so much we figured we should take home a bottle and learn a little more about this grape made popular in Uruguay. We chose to do the pairing with Neil’s sister Marilou, so we headed over to the local grocery store to see what types of cheeses we could find. We chose two of our go-to cheeses, a goat cheese log, and some aged gouda. This evening we were having Wine and Cheese for dinner so we will also be including our pairings with Prosciutto, Salami, kalamata olives, green olives, gluten free crackers and Melba toast. Read More…

Making Cheese in a Tropical Setting, A Visit to Quesos Monte Azul in Chimirol de Rivas, Costa Rica

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. Read More…