During our time in Florida, we’ve been on a search for a place to buy some lesser known wines. A friend in the wine industry suggested, West Palm Wines, http://www.westpalmwines.com, in Ybor City. We finally had a chance to get over to Tampa, since we don’t have a car, to check out the store. It was exactly what we were looking for, I didn’t know any of the wines! After about an hour of searching and roaming around, I spoke with Mark, the owner, to learn about some of the the wines. We talked about their large collection of Sicilian wines, rosés and old world wines.
It’s hard to believe it’s been over a month since Neil and I did a WineAndCheese pairing together! The wine we’ll be tasting this week is the final wine from our Sommly.io order at the end of 2015. Many of the wines we ordered had an earthy/slate flavor profile to them so we thought this one might too. This past weekend we were pleasantly surprised to end up at a gourmet food shop, Locale Market, http://www.localegourmetmarket.com, and figured we might as well pick up some cheese while we were there. It was so much fun being in the presence of all that cheese! Neil and I identified the ones we’ve tried and the handful of others we had not. The main quality we were looking for was "out of the ordinary." When we smelled the tomme crayeuse, we thought of a moldy basement and it looked pretty haggard also. It was exactly what we wanted. So without further ado, the pairing of Cà del Vént and Tomme Crayeuse.
Join Chris Fiore from Wine School 101 (http://www.wineschool101.com) and Maria Ferraro Beardsley from WineAndCheeseFriday (https://wineandcheesefriday.com) as they discuss Wine, Cheese and how they both got into the industry! It’s a great conversation complete with Wine and Cheese tasting notes, Italians talking with their hands, and Neil fielding tech and chat questions. Hope you enjoy the fun too!
The top weather/news story here in Florida this week is Hurricane Hermine. And, playing off this theme, we chose a wine called Class 5 Hurricane. Lucky for us, Hurricane Hermine was barely a hurricane at only class one and did very little damage where we are staying, but still a fun way to build on our current Florida experience. This wine is made by Florida Orange Groves Winery, http://floridawine.com, that uses “untraditional” fruits for winemaking. Their tagline is, “Finally! Wines that taste good”! Although many of you reading the blog would typically choose wines made from grapes, join us in this fun break from tradition.
It’s been a few years since Neil and I have lived in St Petersburg, FL but we are in town temporarily to fix up our house. While we are here, we’ve been trying to figure out a good place to buy wine besides the grocery store. An ABC Fine Wines and Spirits, http://www.abcfws.com, was built down the road after we left and last week we just happened to find out that they were holding their semi-annual wine tasting. When we called the store about making a reservation, we found out there would be over 50 samples of wine and spirits. Obviously we planned to check it out!
This week’s WineAndCheeseFriday was inspired by a bottle of wine from New York. Our neighbor Val’s mom had been saving this bottle from near where she grew up, and decided to give it to Val to see how she liked it. The bottle of wine was from Merritt Winery (http://www.merrittestatewinery.com) in the Lake Erie Wine Region. Knowing that wine region and it’s tendency to be sweet wine, we planned to have some savory snacks to balance it all. Val had a different idea, she though we should have some cheesecake with the wine, which I wouldn’t say no to, so we ended up having both sweet and savory snacks. When Val was picking up the snacks at Publix, she came across another bottle of sweet wine from San Sebastian Winery in Florida (http://www.sansebastianwinery.com) to bring along. She also brought a friend along, Jessica, to join in the fun. We decided to share the wine fun with our other neighbor, Amanda, so there were 5 of us in total. This is a slightly different group but our second time all getting together for a wine tasting (http://mferraro73.tumblr.com/post/135469941803/gouda-goat-cheese-with-chardonnay-and-grenache). And now onto the shenanigans!