When we arrived in Costa Rica, we spent our first week at the beach in Puerto Viejo. The thing about the beach in Costa Rica, or anywhere, is that it’s hot! A little tricky for me to enjoy a nice glass of wine when I’m sweating so I usually seek other options. A great alternative was the box of Sangria that we found with such a fun label. Then as we continued to look in the grocery store, we came across a new brand of Costa Rican cheese. It was settled, we could still do some wine and cheese in more of a tropical way!
Towards the end of our Costa Rica trip, we found ourselves with a whole bunch of wine remaining from that case we had ordered from San Jose! There were a couple that had been earmarked for wine and cheese pairing research and another one that we just wanted to taste. And even two that we didn’t get to but ended up leaving as a Thank You gift for our caretakers. This pairing will kind be a catch all with wine, cheese, multiple dinners and even a little popcorn. We present to you "The Rest of our Wine in 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!
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.
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!
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.
Maria and Neil started wineandcheesefriday.com to learn more about wine in 2014. We’ve visited wineries, and creameries across the world to learn as much as we can about these two wonderful delacacies. We❤️🍷&🧀
