When we attended the Cheese Plus tasting during The Fancy Food show weekend, last year, we had such a wonderful time! We learned about cheeses from all over the world and made some great connections. We knew the event was coming soon so we marked our calendars once we received this year’s invite from Cheese Plus, http://cheeseplus.com. Due to our schedules, Neil and I planned to attend on different days. I will be writing about Friday and he will cover Saturday’s vendors.
For this week’s Wine and Cheese Friday, we will celebrate with Holiday Wines. This could encompass many types of wine but at William Cross Wine Merchant, http://wmcross.com/, they classified it as the questions most commonly asked during the Holidays. Mainly which wines are good crowd pleasers but also a good “party wine” and here in SF, one that would pair well with oysters or crab?
Every year Neil and I stuff a pumpkin instead of a turkey. We found this recipe a few years back when we set out to figure out something for Neil to eat on Thanksgiving with his turkey allergy. This meal has become one of our favorite hearty meals and we usually make it sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The first year we made it we found out the pumpkin size to stuffing amount ratio is harder to estimate than you’d think. This year our experience paid off and we had exactly what we needed to stuff 2 small pie pumpkins. Another thing we figured out was that it’s much easier to eat without the pomegranate seeds. We’ll probably omit these next year too, much easier to chew!
This week we chose a wine from our recent trip to Rosa Fiorelli Winery (http://mferraro73.tumblr.com/post/102075609983/a-visit-back-to-rosa-fiorelli-winery-bradenton). And the cheese really has us wondering, a goat milk Brie, http://cheese.about.com/od/frenchcheeses/p/Goat-Brie.htm. Can’t wait to get into that one! I mentioned this pairing at work before I left one day and had others excited about it too, so without further ado, Aurora Muscadine wine and Goat milk Brie.
We purchased this Merlot back in June when we visited Wente Vineyard, http://mferraro73.tumblr.com/post/88717310148/trip-to-livermore-part-one-its-been-over-a. Neil and our friend KerryAnn really liked it but I didn’t have a chance to try it that day.
We know how much Linda, Neil’s mom, enjoys wine so we did a second WineAndCheese while we were with her in Florida. That’s what we’ll be discussing today. The wine of choice: Malbec. For some reason, it is not one I see all that often in California so I wanted to get a better idea of the characteristics of this type of wine.