Shortly after arriving in Billings, Montana, we found out there was a local winery, Yellowstone Cellars & Winery. Then as luck would have it, we mentioned to our AirBnB host about #wineandcheesefriday and he presented us with a bottle from there. Right around that same time, we found a Farmer’s Market, which is one of our favorite places to find cheese. Grindy's Cheeseballs, had a booth there and they offered about a half dozen spreadable cheese options, so we picked up two different ones. Now if only we could get over those head colds so we could enjoy them!
During our time in Costa Rica (much longer than we expected) we’ve been finding some really nice wines and cheeses. This trip we’ve had more purchasing options since we’ve been traveling around the country more. This has allowed us to find brands and shops that we never visited before. We’re also aware that it isn’t crucial to refrigerate cheese immediately so we’ve been fine taking the chance of driving home with it for a couple hours without thinking twice.
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 I saw this wine in the store I was a little confused. It said the name of the wine but then "by Cono Sur” at the bottom of the label. I decided not to get it the first time around because we had a few wines already queued up for future WineAndCheeseFriday pairings. I contacted Cono Sur on Twitter to ask about this mysterious line of wines since I couldn’t find it on their website. As always they were very helpful and said was it called “Tocornal?” Yes, that’s one of ours, but its only distributed in Canada, Latin America and Russia. Well this created a buzz on Twitter and for me so I figured I should go back and find it. A week later in another grocery store, there it was and, lucky us, they had a Carmenere! What a fun chance to compare the Bicicleta Carmenere from a few years ago, https://wineandcheesefriday.com/carmenere-and-camembert/, to the Tocornal Carmenere now. The cheese is from our giant farmer’s market, La Feria. We found this cheese in Colibri's Corner, the booth on the end. This booth always has all sorts of tasty treats like spices, baked goods and chocolate. Neil picked up this wedge of cheese and said it smelled kind of smoky and that we should get it. Always on a quest for new cheese, I happily agreed.
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❤️🍷&🧀
