We told you about our visit to the North Carolina Cheese Shop so now we’ll talk about the NC winery. As you know, Neil and I love traveling for wine (and cheese). There’s just so much out there to learn about and taste! We found this winery on the way out to Asheville and it’s the first NC winery we’ve visited. Mary, one of the owners, greeted us in their tasting room.
We visited Asheville, NC, a few weeks back with our friend Doris. While we were coming up with ideas for the trip, I searched for local cheese shops. We were staying in Fletcher which is about a 20 minute drive outside of Asheville. Imagine our surprise when we found Looking Glass Creamery on that list and it was only a few minutes away from our AirBnB. We chose to go there Saturday in the early afternoon. The timing couldn’t have better as the sky opened up into thunderstorms just as we walked into the shop.
Towards the end of our Costa Rica trip, we found ourselves with a whole bunch of wine remaining from that case we had ordered from San Jose! There were a couple that had been earmarked for wine and cheese pairing research and another one that we just wanted to taste. And even two that we didn’t get to but ended up leaving as a Thank You gift for our caretakers. This pairing will kind be a catch all with wine, cheese, multiple dinners and even a little popcorn. We present to you "The Rest of our Wine in Costa Rica."
Being the Wine Fan that I am, people sometimes send me listings for wine events. The Wine Feed, a new wine shop in Durham, puts on a weekly #WineWednesday Free tasting, so how could I resist checking it out. When we arrived we found out the theme for the week was “Italian Wines” and it was being sponsored by a local distributor of wines from Italy. We happily joined in to taste the three wines available that evening.
I was on Social Media recently when someone said “Maria, we’d guess that you have some cool chip and dip pairings with wine.” Surprisingly I didn’t so when I saw this cheese at the Durham Farmer’s Market, my gears started turning. What if we used this soft-ripened cheese, that is essentially a dip, with some multigrain chips and turned them into bruschetta? And since bruschetta is Italian, we could see what kind of Italian wine we could find to pair with it. Not quite chips and dip in the traditional sense but we are far from traditional people. We present to you, our version of chips and dip featuring a Super Tuscan Wine, Cottonbell Cheese (by Boxcarr Handmade Cheese) and Italian Tomatoes.
We told you about how much fun we had creating our first home wine tasting so we decided to do another. The wines actually all came from the same distributor in San Jose, CR. It was so much fun to purchase an entire case of new wines to taste! Today’s set of wines are all 2017 Torrontés wines from Argentina. We’ve only tried one or two bottles of this grape before this tasting so we figured it would be interesting to try a few different brands side by side. Do you ever try varietal specific tastings? Let’s see how ours turns out!