Wine and Cheese Day happens once a year, according to the calendar, on July 25, but for all you readers out there, you know it happens a lot more than that in our house! It’s been a little while since we’ve had time to sit around enjoying wine and cheese but for the official holiday, it was a must!
We chose this weeks WineAndCheeseFriday wine by a recommendation from Li at The Wining Hour. I asked her one day during #WiningHourChat on Twitter, “What Italian wine I should try?" and she suggested Gavi. I was so excited to find it during my last trip to Trader Joe’s. She told me it was a dry white wine that she liked but I didn’t really remember much else, so it kind of left our cheese options open.
When we last visited Trader Joe’s we saw this white blend from South Africa. Since we haven’t had many South African wines, we figured we’d give it a try. The salesperson said it would be a good wine to enjoy in the Florida sunshine. Not being familiar with these varietals, we googled what type of cheese would work, and chose herbed goat cheese. Let’s see if we made the right choice?
We promised more wines from West Palm Wines and here you go! During our trip there, we saw this Pecorino wine and knowing there is a Pecorino cheese, I had to get it for a WineAndCheeseFriday Pairing. The cheese is Pecorino Romano and you’ve probably already guessed that we found it at Trader Joe’s. We did try out another store first but they didn’t carry it. We should have just gone to our old standby to start. I was so curious to see what the link between the wine and cheese would be for them both to be named Pecorino. I thought it might have been where they are from in Italy.
Raise your hand if you want drinkable dinner wines that don’t break the bank ?, I know we do! We’ve been in Florida for about 6 months now and finding those tasty, inexpensive, uncommon wines is always our task at hand. This being said, we have found quite a few around the area at Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Walgreens and a small specialty shop called West Palm Wines. Join us as we taste through about a dozen examples.
This Christmas season, we planned to make some mulled wine for Christmas Eve. Many of my readers know how much I like Trader Joe’s and they just happened to carry a juice called Winter Wassail. This seemed like a familiar word I’d heard in a Christmas carol but what does it mean? According to Wikipedia, the house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl in exchange for gifts. Well that sounds fun! And it was so easy, we just had to add some red wine and warm it up!