"Pour yourself a glass of Dornish wine" Tywin pours Dorn wine for most visitors

Who’s Drinking What Based on Region

North / Stark

Climate

The North, ruled by House Stark of Winterfell, is a huge sparsely populated region. Most of the region is susceptible to particularly long winters making growing crops difficult, if not impossible. Special greenhouses are built that take advantage of hot springs and volcanic vents allowing crops in these regions to grow year-round. A small portion of the north maintains a cool and temperate climate similar to that of Scotland.

Sparkling Wine

With a short growing season, The North relies on resilient vines and a higher acid style of wine. Sparkling wines made from gruner veltliner, chardonnay and some pinot noir would most likely to be cultivated in The North. Cellar temperatures are perfect for long term aging with imported red wines from the Riverlands.

Iron Islands / Greyjoy

Climate

The smallest and least populated region, the Iron Islands are seven barely-fertile rocks located just off-shore.

No Wine Production. Whisky.

With a transient population of shippers, the people of the Iron Island bring in long-lived wines for long-term aging (most likely from neighboring Westerlands). However, based on the cultural implications, the people of the Iron Isles probably consume far more whisky, aging them in used sweet wine barrels from Dorn.

Riverlands / Tully

Climate

The Riverlands is centrally located and is a temperate, fertile region dominated by multiple rivers coming together forming what they call the Trident. Most of the growing region benefits from warm summers and moderate winters.

Chardonnay and Pinot Noir

A fertile area with alluvial soils and moderate regional temperatures is ideal for Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris and Ugni blanc (Ugni b. is distilled into fine aged brandies). Although such fertile lands don’t make the highest quality wines, they definitely produce a lot. The best vineyard lands are most likely are along kingsroad on a south facing slopes. Less fertile slopes force the vines to struggle and produce more concentrated wines.

Vale / Arryn

Climate

The Vale is an area surrounded almost completely by Mountains. The Vale itself has a temperate climate with fertile meadows and forests. Water is easily accessible from snowmelt funneled through a never-ending waterfall. The soil is rich and black.

Riesling with Intense Terrior

With volcanic rocky soils and schist the people of Vale most likely grow riesling, gewurztraminer, pinot blanc, with a little pinot noir. The Vale is distinguishable by a unique terrior(see us ‘taste’ terrior) that is often referred to as smokey, meaty and earthy. The Wines from The Vale are rarely exported because of the difficulty of transport and are hailed by their uniqueness and scarcity. Because of the average temperatures in the region, the best vineyards gather any available sunshine from steep rocky vineyards.

Westerlands / Lannister

Climate

The Westerlands is a land of hills and valleys sandwiched between the well-watered Riverlands to the east and the sea. The soil is rich in minerals and precious metals, particularly gold and silver.

Cabernet is King

A mining region before a wine region, the soils in the valleys and low hills in the Westerlands are ideal for Cabernet Sauvignon. Producing wines of great intensity and age-worthy character, the Lannisters are sitting on a gold mine of wine potential, whether they realize it or not.

Reach / Tyrell

Climate

The Reach is the most lush, fertile and populated region of Westeros, ruled by House Tyrell. Well known for having the most sought after wines. Plentiful access to water from the River Mander.

Rich Red Blends for The Wealthy

The best vineyards are located on low hills and are most likely planted with Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, Syrah, and Merlot. With clay based alluvial soils the focus for The Reach is fine red wine blends that are marketed to the nobility in and out of the region. Because of The Reaches high population, the wines are well known about and the dominating producers are probably well-established.

Stormlands / Baratheon

Climate

The Stormlands are damp, wet and contain many forests. Reaching out on peninsula, the region is bordered by Shipbreaker Bay and the Dornish Sea to the south.

Simple Fresh White Wines

Very little red wine of note, some zesty whites including albariño and vino verde.

Dorne / Martell

Climate

Dorne is the least populated and hottest region. An arid, dry, and rocky landscape featuring the only desert. Though it does have some rivers which create patches of fertile land, enough to keep the land habitable throughout the year. This is the only region which citrus fruits grow. Dornish wine is known to be among the best values of all regions.

Fortified Dessert Wines and Value Reds

Since wine is very drought resistant, Dorn has grown into a region producing a large amount of Tempranillo, Mouvedre, Garnacha, Palomino and Pedro Ximenez. The latter two varietals are reserved for producing fortified sweet wines that are most likely produced by large houses in Sunspear, Dorn and shipped. The red wines are fruit forward with dried berry flavors making Dornish wine some of the best valued red wines of Westeros.

Got something to add? Post it below in the comments!

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French 75 Recipe

Ingredients & Tools Needed

• 1.5 ounces gin –We used Bombay gin
• .5 ounces lemon juice
• .25 ounces simple syrup –Make your own simple syrup with equal parts hot water and sugar; it lasts for about a week in the fridge
• ~1 ounce of Champagne –we used Cava, similar to Poema Brut
• A Cocktail Mixer – a cocktail mixer with a glass and metal cup are more popular because they allow the ice to be shaken with the extended space
• A Jigger – for measuring a proper shot, such as these jiggers
• A Strainer

Measure the gin,lemon juice and simple syrup with the jigger and pour into the mixing glass of the cocktail mixer. Cover mixture with ice and shake for about 8-10 seconds. Strain with a cocktail strainer through a tea strainer (if you’d like to lemon perfectly strained) into a Champagne glass. Top with Cava. Garnish with a peel of lemon.

The First French 75 Recipe Called For Gin

The original Savoy Cocktail book came out during the depression in 1930. This photo is of the original edition.

Transcript
The French 75. It’s gotten really popular, I feel like a lot of people are asking about the French 75. The Savoy cocktail book calls for two-thirds gin, one-third lemon and a spoon full of sugar. So we’re going to do an ounce and a half here of gin. Bombay dry, this is our well gin. We have lemon juice here as well. We’re going to do half an ounce of that. Instead of a spoon full of sugar, I’m going to use simply syrup. This is a one to one ratio of hot water and sugar. Then add ice. Shake that. Strain that. And top that with the cava. That’s a french 75. That’s a delicious beverage.

Sources
1. French 75 on wikipedia

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Turning what would be waste into fine spirits and vermouth? A new market for the wine community

Zero-Waste Winery in Action

BYOB Winery, Seattle, WA

Imagine standing in an industrial building that is about 10,000 square feet, there’s a huge block of racked oak barrels a shiny stainless steel bottling line. While staring at all this familiar winery equipment and counting expensive French barrels full of wine, you see 2 copper stills with a large open gas burner in full flame. This was the scene we walked into when visiting BYOB Winery, a custom crush facility in downtown Seattle. BYOB takes its surplus wine and distills it into brandy. From this point, The winery can either use the brandy as a neutral grape spirit to add to dessert wines (such as Port), vermouth or make a proper oak-aged brandy.

BYOB Winery found their antique copper still in Turkey

A sidecar is a classic brandy-based cocktail with lemon

Making Exceptional Vermouth from Surplus Grapes

Cana’s Feast, Carlton, OR

After falling head over heels in love with a rare Italian vermouth called Chinato, winemaker Patrick Taylor realized he had all the tools in front of him to give-a-go at this unique style of vermouth. Traditional Chinato Barolo is nebbiolo grapes (the same grapes that go into Italy’s most coveted Barolo), quinine and a blend of heart-warming botanicals including clove, vanilla, star anise, fennel and cardamon. Taylor had access to nebbiolo grapes and was already making a varietal wine for Cana’s Feast, so after an arduous year of experimenting with roots, spices and herbs he created Cana’s Feast’s own Chinato d’Erbetti.

Chinato and soda (foreground), Chinato Boulevardier cocktail with bourbon (background)

Cognac…ahem.. Brandy Made With Mendocino Wine Grapes

Germain Robin, Mendocino, CA

If you’re not in Cognac, France you cannot call a brandy Cognac, however, that doesn’t mean it’s any less amazing. Germain-Robin started with a partnership of 2 people in 1982 with a passion for craft-method distillation, techniques handed down for centuries from master to apprentice.* (*Germain-Robin site). By using premium wines and grapes that were often bought at surplus prices, Ansley Coale and Hubert Germain-Robin started producing very unique brandies made with Pinot Noir, Chenin Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc and others.

Fluid Dynamics Brandy Manhattan from Germain-Robin aka craftdistillers.com

Grappa, a High-End Liquor Made with Winery ‘Waste’

Clear Creek Distillery, Portland, OR

Picture by Kenn Wilson (on flickr)

It’s Legal

All of this can be done legally in a Bonded Winery in 2 ways.

• An additional Distilled Spirits Bond with a Wine Premise Alteration
• Or Just a Wine Premise Alteration (just for handling spirits–not making them)

If you run a winery or know someone who does, check out this direct link to the legal documentation to Wine Premise Alternation http://gpo.gov

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Wine Folly - Learn about wine and spirits.

Last month we had our first big meeting with all the founders. And.. by all the founders, I mean the three troublemakers who keep this boat afloat (Madeline, Justin, Chad). At the meeting we talked about what we were building, what our values were, and how best we can help new wine drinkers discover great wine. (Because seriously, no first time wine drinker should have to run the gauntlet at a supermarket.) We also dug through a bunch of analytics, reviewed our goals and talked about the upcoming wine courses..

New Site Design

In anticipation of the wine courses we tweaked the site design to be easier to use. Here is a comparison:

Wine Courses, Coming Soon, Seriously.

We’ve been working on the wine courses 12 hours a day for the last couple months and now we’re finally on the home stretch. In april we spent about a week filming all the off-site material. Turns out eastern Washington is a lot like Tatooine; ankle socks and a pair of shorts did little to repel the murderous red ant armies.

Now that we’re back in the safety of our urban dwellings we’re busy editing video, writing scripts and putting the finishing touches on the set. So far.. everything looks BADASS.

The first course is on Horse Heaven Hills, a growing region in eastern Washington. We’ll go into all the details that make this region unique. We take a typical Wine Folly approach, unconventional, light-hearted, slightly sarcastic while still informative.

 
Horse Heaven Hills Course

• 100% Free (wine not included)
• Two Tier Tasting (beginner/advanced)
• Overview of the Region
• Geography, History Lesson
• Varietals, Winemakers Lesson

First Quarter Report

Wine Folly is young, super young! We celebrated our 3 month business birthday with a meeting. (yay!?) A few interesting stats.. We have over 77 posts, 30 of which are videos and 2 were published on Huffington Post. We also broke 1,000 twitter followers and have over 300 people on the waiting list for wine courses. AWESOME. Our minds are boggled from the love we’ve received in the wine community, you guys are fantastic!

Best of all, we’re just getting started and there is a butt ton (business term) of fantastic content coming your way. As for site traffic, here is a chart of our growth:

Wine Folly First Quarter Growth

Right now we get about 266 visitors per day. Not shabby for site without advertising. However, we can’t take the credit, it’s you guys who are making the difference. Thank you for being so generous and regularly sharing our content! It means a lot to us!

JUST KIDDING! But seriously, the share buttons are at the bottom.

Challenges in Wine Culture

During our meeting we spent a long time talking about ethics and the direction of wine culture. There is a growing inequality between highly rated bulk wine which can get powerful mainstream distribution and small batch artisan wine. It’s an incredibly frustrating balance in the wine world, as a business you want to look at what’s accessible, what’s easy to deliver. However, on the other hand there is a huge hole in the market where winemakers are producing incredible, unique wines that just don’t get the same distribution.

The amazing part is that wine isn’t constrained by the three tier system. Many (most), wineries can ship direct to consumer. That’s INCREDIBLE! The hard part becomes, how do you turn people on to this? How do you get people excited about wine they’ve never heard of? It’s premium wine, which means you’re asking people to take a risk, but it’s oh so worth it! The easy road is to chase wine ratings, endorse mass produced well distributed wines, and pass that on to the consumer like everyone else.

Our promise to you is that we won’t take the easy road. You deserve to enjoy craft wines, to escape in a vicarious experience that connects you with the region, people and passion; even if it means our margins aren’t as good or it’s more work.

The Future

Right now we’re working hard to launch the wine courses. The plan is to release a wine course every month, systematically tying wines with their regions and eventually creating a map for wine drinkers to explore. We’ll also provide tools so you can keep notes on regions that interest you and help you connect with the winemakers/wines you love.

Hungry for knowledge? Watch a demo Wine Course on Argentina.

Team Wine Folly

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Wines Are Not Created Equal

We know not all wines are created equal. But does that really mean a $50 wine is 10x better than a $5 wine? Certainly prestige plays a role as does the cost of raw ingredients and ultimately supply/demand trends will dictate prices. However, the majority of wine can be bracketed assuming you are making smart choices.

Wine Pricing Breakdown

<$7 Used Junker of Wine

A wine of inexhaustible supply, mixed from leftovers in a refinery, often manipulated as a consistent mass produced product is important. Wine in this range is designed to just get by, patch working fundamental wine flaws present from using inferior ingredients. That doesn’t mean it can’t taste descent or be functional. Just remember, warranty not included, bought as-is.

<$10 Honda Civic of Wine

A compact, single noted, un-complex wine can be had in this range. It does one thing and it does it fairly well, it’s easy to drink. You won’t find as many flaws and if you do they’ll be less obvious. It will reliably get you where you’re going on a budget. However, you sacrifice nearly all amenities and anything that would make wine remotely unique.

<$15 Toyota Camry of Wine

A great bargain for your money can be had in this range. It’s still likely unsophisticated and single noted but you’re starting to see some creature comforts that go a long way. It’s consistently reliably and the best bang for your buck. It’s not fully loaded and you’ll have to sacrifice one thing or another, but in the end it’ll get you 90% of the way to any other wine listed below.

<$30 BMW 3-Series of Wine

For all intents and purposes this is an exceptionally well made product and you’ll be wholly satisfied. You can get a fully loaded wine with complex rich flavors free of flaws. Availability is bountiful in a range of styles. Wine in this price bracket is more than we practically need in day to day activities, rich with luxuries that never leave us disappointed. It’s made to last while at the same time extremely flexible and drinkable.

<$50 BMW M3 of Wine

A-ha, the first step in diminishing returns. You are starting to pay substantially more for subtle nuanced gains. At this point you’re buying style, performance and a heavily tuned in product which matches specific preferences. This is where character and personality start to play a much larger role in wine. It’s not that the wine is THAT much better than the former, but rather, you’re willing to pay more to get exactly what you want, including sitting on a waiting list for a final product.

<$100 Porsche 911 of Wine

Now we are just talking exotics and nuanced differences. This experience is more about the consumer and less about the wine. The majority of the time these wines go under appreciated and day to day, they just aren’t practical drinking wines. We’ll see people buying them just to show off, wherein these people can’t even taste the difference. Similarly you’ll see people zooming by in their BMW M3 wines having a much better time because they bought what they love and know how to appreciate it.

$100+ Bugatti Venom of Wine

Simply, this is just gratuitous. You can probably find the same performance and quality in a wine from the above group, here you’re paying for prestige, heritage and limited supply. This range has no limit, it’s more akin to buying popular collectable art than it is to practical wine drinking.

Disagree? Are you a practical wine drinker sucking down Cristal like it’s water? Tell me about it.

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A Champagne spoon by Ruinart looks pretty but even they admit it doesn't work

• Stanford tested this in 1994 and said Yes it’s true.
• Vins de Champagnes tested it in an article in Pour la Science (edition 208, p.16, 1994) and concluded that No it’s not.
• This guy on the Kumkani blog (a South African Sparkling wine house) tested bottles and painstakingly counted bubbles after which he compared bell curve graphs. He concluded that over the course of a few hours it Did indeed work!
• Ruinart decided that the whole champagne spoon myth was a great opportunity to make an elegant silver “spoon” stopper (pictured above) although they claim “we’d like to believe this one, even though we don’t.“

What is going on? After reading a few more French blogs (and realizing that all my highschool French had all but gone to waste), I thought about the champagne spoon bubble problem on a physical level and reasoned that it is not true and here’s why:

Since a spoon does not halt the process of depressurization of the champagne (which is how those magical bubbles are in the wine in the first place), than the champagne spoon trick does not have any physical properties to make it true.

Conclusion: If You Believe in Magic, The Champagne Spoon Trick Will Work

The night after writing and researching Champagne and Spoons, I reclined in an old faux leather couch with a glass of Australian gewurztraminer from Adelaide Hills and flipped on Game of Thrones. In the episode, an evil demon-zealot bitch birthed a black smoky ghost-child which proceeded to stab through the heart one of the last remaining characters that I was enjoying. My face twisted in disgust as I silently hoped that no more death would happen to my remaining top 3 favorites. The people in The Seven Kingdoms probably all preserve their open champagne with a silver spoon… if they don’t drink it all first.

Get a list of some of our top grower Champagnes if I succeeded in making you thirsty

Sources
1. Ruinart Champagne (The Collections: The Champagne Spoon)
2. Stanford Article circa 1994 (test subject admitted to loosing their judgement throughout the duration of the test)
3. The Kumkani Blog Post
4. Game of Thrones HBO Show wiki

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Bitter, fat, acid, salt, sweetness and alcohol balance together to make a perfect pairing.

The 6 Basics to Food and Wine Pairing

I was half asleep in the morning in a dark Michael Mina Restaurant until Chef Mike boomed in his signature snide-but-charismatic voice,

1. Acidity
2. Fat
3. Bitter (aka Tannin)
4. Salt
5. Sweet
6. Alcohol

A regional match is almost always your best match for food and wine pairing

Regional Pairing

The idea of a regional pairing is pretty fundamental. Imagine Italian wine and Italian food or an Oregon pinot noir with a cow’s-milk cheese from the Willamette Valley. Regional matches aren’t always the perfect pairing, however they provide a template for us to understand more about what’s going on structurally with wine & food pairings.

Acid + Acid

Unlike bitter, acidity can be added together between food and wine and creates the basis of what wine people think about when selecting a wine with dinner. If the wine has less acidity than the food than the wine will taste flat. An easy visualization for acids out-of-balance is a glass of oaked Warm-climate chardonnay with a vinaigrette salad. When pairing a dish with wine, consider the acid balance between the food and the wine.

Sweet & Salty

If you love maple bacon, candied pecans and salted caramels than a wine and food pairing where a sweet wine with salty food will probably delight you. Riesling with asian foods such as fried rice to Pad Thai or one of my favorite “low calorie” desserts of pretzels and tawny port.

Bitter + Fat

Grab a big thick piece of fatty something-er-ether and pair it with a wine with lots of tannin. The is the classic steak with red wine food pairing, however, I think we can do better than that. Take a red wine such as an Italian Sangiovese with lots of cherry flavors. Pair the wine with an herbed potato croquette, roasted red tomatoes and rocket (a classic Tuscan Secondi). Suddenly you have a dish that has the tannin balanced with the fat in the croquette and a congruent flavor in the dish and wine (tomato and cherry) that elevate each other. I’m already drooling.

Acid + Fat

Nothing like a glass of champagne to cut the fat. A high acid drink will add a range of interesting flavors to a lipid heavy dish. This is why white wine butter sauce is popular (you can watch a video of How to Make Buerre Blanc if you like) The white wine in the butter sauce livens up the whole dish. So, when you are in a situation where there is something fatty, like cheese cake, get a glass of something bubbly and zippy.

Alcohol + Fat

The Alcohol category is a bit of a strange one. The alcohol taste actually comes across as acidity so a lot of the same ideologies of the Acid + Fat category pass over into Alcohol + Fat. The primary difference is that a high alcohol drink should not be used as a palate-cleanser because that will eff you up. Instead look at an alcohol + fat category as a way to mitigate high-speed food consumption. A glass of 17% ABV zinfandel will greatly slow down the rate at which you consume your pepper steak. I use the alcohol + fat category a lot for dessert, but I’d like to see it more in dining as we learn to eat slower and enjoy longer.

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getting saucy without pants.

Unoaked Chardonnay

Imagine a chardonnay with no butter, no vanilla and no cream. Forget lattes, cappuccinos and all the creamy business… we just want black coffee. For those who’ve elevated their wine tasting chops to something beyond milk fat, unoaked chardonnay sounds pretty compelling. There’s a couple of other things that make unoaked chardonnay delicious, sustainable and even technically more affordable than the oaked version. Once you read the factoids you can delve into the list of worthy no oak chardonnays and get your lips wet.

OG Style. Chablis vineyards at Les Clos courtesy of Drouhin

Not Your Auntie’s Chardonnay

A lil’ history Unoaked chardonnay was popularized by Chablis, a region about 80 miles Northwest of Dijon, France in Burgundy. Since the wines from Chablis traditionally are made with stainless steel, concrete or neutral oak, they do not have the butter-cream style (the one that Auntie loves). Chablis popularized this style and soon everyone around the world started labeling their no-oak chardonnays with the word “Chablis” until France complained. Unoaked chardonnay tastes only of the varietal characters of chardonnay which are green apple, lemon and sometimes pineapple with a long tingly finish.

Malolactic Fermentation Definition Simplified

What is MLF and how does it affect chardonnay? Sometimes wine producers put chardonnay through malolactic fermentation (happens in tank after the first fermentation) which alters the acids in the wine from the harsher malic acid (same acids found in green apples) to oilier lactic acid (a bacteria that is more common in sour cream). What’s important to note is that not all unoaked chardonnays go through MLF where as most oaked chardonnays do, so it’s hard to tell the difference between the oily texture of malo versus the buttery-vanilla flavor of oak.

No Oak Chardonnay is Cheaper to Produce

Yep. It’s true. Take out the cost of paying for and shipping new oak barrels all over the world year in and year out and winemakers have a cheaper longterm solution. Thus, a lot of unoaked wines tend to fly in the marketplace at a much more affordable price point (and more sustainable).

Good Unoaked Chardonnay

This is a list of wines that I’ve tried in the last year that are 100% unoaked and 100% approved to be drinkable.

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Join us as we adventure into the mysterious world of wine and cheese pairings with Steve Jones, professional cheese monger and owner of Cheese Bar, Portland OR.

How to Pair Wine and Cheese Guide

If You Know the Wine

Step 1 Regional Match: When pairing wine and cheese you can’t go wrong with regional matches. French cheese for French wine, American cheese for American wine and so on. This is your starting point and should be relatively self explanatory, but is an essential first step.

Step 2 Contrast Match: Harder cheese with lighter wines and softer cheese with bolder wines. Then consider who is going to be the star of the pairing? If you have a bold in-your-face wine, then look for an understated cheese, or vice versa. The idea is to compliment the more prominent pairing. You know have a great pairing, for a perfect pairing you’ll need to know the flavor profile of the wine. Then match it with the flavor profile of the cheese, this will take some trial and error.. Tough life, eh?

Cheater Cheeses for Any Wine

Compte Extra: A semi-firm french cheese made from cows milk. This is the most common of the cheater cheeses and possibly the safest all around bet. It’s relatively hard, yet flexible, appealing to a wide range of cheese lovers with a strong and slightly sweet flavor. It will comfortably pair with just about any wine, however, it will show best with lighter reds and creamy whites.

Abbaye de Belloc: A semi-firm french cheese made from sheep milk. Made by Benedictine Monks at the abbey of Notre-Dame de Belloc (how cool is that?), it’s a fine, dense, fatty cheese with caramelized complex flavors. A perfect pairing cheese for lighter wines. It’ll work with lighter/medium bodied reds but is most at home within the full spectrum of whites. An ideal choice if you suspect beer drinkers and champagne lovers will be present.

Colombier: A creamy french farmhouse cheese made from goats milk. Yup, you’re going to get a little bit of barn-house with this unique cheese, so I’d look towards an old world pairing. If you suspect your cheese needs to stand up to robust powerful wines, hearty meals and rich ingredients, this is your cheater cheese.

Cheese Bar – Portland, OR

Steve Jones, cheese monger extraordinaire, was kind enough to sit down with us and share his expertise in wine and cheese pairings. Thank you! If you find yourself in the Portland area, be sure to stop in and check out his shop. Pro Tip: Beer pairs even better with cheese! Stop in for lunch, take a seat at the bar, order a sandwich, a beer and a perfect cheese pairing, you won’t be disappointed. http://cheese-bar.com/

Boedecker Cellars

Boedecker Cellars was generous enough to donate a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir to our quest for the perfect wine and cheese pairing. Thank you! (Try their Pinot Noir w/Compte for the same pairing Madeline had!) http://boedeckercellars.com/

Transcript:
How do you go about pairing cheese and wine? We look at it generally in three different ways. A regional match is almost always your best pair. So a wine and a cheese from the same region, I feel are almost always going to be the best match. Two other ways to go about it are contrasting, so I can take something that is very heavy and pair it with something very light, or something that is very sweet and pair it with something salty. Lastly, you can pair in parallel, say something nutty with something that has sweet nutty flavors. And that’s generally how we pair wine. If you don’t know what wine you are pairing with and you’re going to a party, we have some general cheeses called cheater cheeses. They generally go well with almost any wine. They are cheeses we have in our pocket ready to bust out for parties. I honestly was not expecting that, I bit into the cheese and was like, this is kinda cool, whatever. and then I tried the wine and it brought out all the spice characteristics in the wine, and then the cheese tasted like nutty, and almond, all these flavors all at once. Do you get the hazelnut thing? OMG, I think that’s a perfect pairing. I think you just found a perfect pairing. So, that’s another cheater cheese. I’m Steve Jones, I’m the owner of Cheese Bar here in Portland, OR. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and people are like, oh, you must know everything. I think I maybe know 10%

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