As a winelover it was necessary that I visit a vineyard and winery during my trip to Italy! Luckily I have a friend Matteo who lives here and he could recommend somewhere we’d be able to go for a tasting.
It’s North Carolina Wine Month so let’s celebrate with Cabernet Franc from South Creek Winery in Nebo, NC and Carolina Bleu Marble cheese from Ashe County Cheese, also made in North Carolina. We purchased both this wine and cheese when we made our way out towards Asheville, NC in the summer, https://wineandcheesefriday.com/south-creek-winery-visit-nebo-nc/. This would be our first winery visit in North Carolina so we were anxious to sip the wines.
This wine will be the first in the set of wines recently purchased at West Palm Wines. We went there just before Christmas to purchase our gift to ourselves?. We chose this bordeaux wine with the idea that we really liked how bordeaux wine smelled in the past. We also figured one that was more Merlot based would be easy to drink. French wine can be challenging to navigate when you don’t know the different chateaus so be sure to ask your salesperson! Thanks for your help Mark! The cheese, huntsman, is a combination of 2 different cheeses, how could we pass it up? We spent New Years Weekend with our friends Pam and Josie, fellow winelovers, so what better way to bring in the New Year! And now the pairing of Château Les Grandes Mottes Bordeaux and Huntsman Cheese.
It’s been over a year since we visited any Sonoma vineyards so we took a trip out when Benno and Nora were here. We had a chance to visit a few places that day but today’s entry will be about Wilson Winery. (http://wilsonwinery.com) We heard about Wilson Winery from the lady at the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce and saw that they had food available too so we planned to have lunch there that day. This was our first time visiting the Dry Creek Valley region of Sonoma so we were excited to taste another area’s terroir!
In order to celebrate WineAndCheeseFriday this week, we purchased tickets to the French Wine Tasting Event, hosted by Pierre Sparr, owner of Charles Sparr Winery. This event was held at the BevMo down the street from our apartment. (http://www.bevmo.com) They remodeled the entire store a few months ago and now have a tasting bar where they hold weekend happy hours as well as some more formal tasting events. This will be our first time using their tasting bar so let the tasting begin.
Touring around Lake County was amazing and exciting to see the different volcanic soils. We started in a vineyard with red coarse dirt and ended with black obsidian. Either way, it would be impossible to dig in. Also all of the minerals in the soil carry through into the wines, can you say terroir?