A couple months ago, I took a brie and wine making class at a terrific little shop in Denver. Wine & Whey provided us with everything we needed to make the most adorable little brie and a few bottles of a Zin Shiraz blend. I knew I wanted to use the blog logo for our label and think it turned out pretty cool. Our first vintage-yay! 🙂
So at 9:30 a.m. this morning (it’s NFL playoff season and the instructor wanted to be home in time for the opening kickoff for her team). I was pouring, corking, and foiling my bottles. Now all I have to do now is wait patiently for those puppies to fully mature! In 6 months they should be pawsome. I’m so excited I can barely standing it. Here’s hoping your team won this weekend. Cheers! 🍷
Really? You have to wait that long? How’s a wine drinker supposed to survive when you can drink the stuff faster than it ages? 🙂 I’m looking into flights to Denver in six months….;-)
Zin & Shiraz can be a pretty complex blend. They need time to meld and mature. Good news though, I should have the guest room completely gussied up by the time it’s ready. 😉
I hope you didn’t drink all that wine 🙂
Not yet! 😉
that sounds great! I never tried that but I bet it’s a lot of fun to make your own cheese&wine :o)
Wine AND cheese class…that sounds very civilised! Now hide those bottles!
Sounds like a blast! Good luck 🙂
Wow Monika & Sam!
You can trawl the globe searching for a kindred spirit and here you are. I’m not much of a wine drinker but I do like the idea of making my own and definitely making the Brie cheese. I have seen cheese making kits around and perhaps I should have a go.
I can see my Dad tasting your wine and pronouncing it: “A jolly good year!!”
My husband comes from Tasmania and his Dad’s cousin was having trouble making ends meet as a dairy and went into cheese-making and haven’t looked back. They invented Wasabi cheese, which is now available throughout the supermarkets here. If I was out to impress with my foodie know-how, this would be the cheese I’d serve..along with my favourite King Island Brie, which is a really creamy brie. Hate to think how much fat is in that stuff but I never look. Some things are best left a mystery!!
There is a wonderful story somewhere online about how this cheese was conceived but I did find this:
“What started as a wild idea between Tasmanian wasabi pioneer Ian Farquhar and cheese maker Jane Bennett has led to one of the most popular and well-known cheese products in the Australian dairy industry. So popular in fact Ashgrove Cheese’s Wild Wasabi Cheese is now exported to Japan.”
When we were last in Tassie about 9 years ago, we visited 3 cheese factories in a week. I was in heaven!! xx Rowena
Isn’t is remarkable to be just a click away from someone half way around the world? 🙂 I continue to be in awe of technology. I think I’ll be doing the mozzarella and wine class next. By all accounts of the others in the class, the brie was fairly salty so I plan to en croute it in pastry with some dried cherries, pecans, and some rosemary to balance out the saltiness. The idea of making cheese is beyond magical and is one of my favorite foods to eat! What’s the poem say, the cheese stands alone 😉
Technology is amazing. I gather you must love food and cooking to be making your own cheese but when I read about how you were going to mix the brie in with pecans and dried cherries, that sounded very exotic and then I realised these could well be staple ingredients over there.
We’ve been having variations on a mango, avocado, cashew and bacon salad which is just right for our Australian summer. I also use a lot of macadamia nuts and have them in a jar in the pantry. Do you get them over there?
Yes, Hawaii produces tons of mac nuts and I could get all I wanted from my son who lives on the big island. Alas, I’m not so keen on macs–go figure. And I’m certainly no foodie but came upon that dried cherries recipe by accident. It’s hard to go all out cooking for yourself and dogs tend to have a rather unsophisticated palate. 🙂
LOVE that label. Cheers!
How fun! That sounds like an awesome class. I bet you can’t wait to try the wine huh?
Love brie cheese too. I wonder if they have classes like that here in MN? Hmmm…
Go Broncos!
That sounds like my kind of class. Your blog logo is a great wine label; in fact, I had thought quite a ways back when I first saw it. I do smile at the notion of having to age your wine “6 months.” I picture you and Sam cracking a bottle and remarking, “Ah yes, a fine vintage, late January if my taste buds serve.”
😉 no doubt I’ll let ‘er ripen a ‘bit’ longer than 6 months, but it’ll be hard to wait for that first taste, but I think worth to lit. For the time being I’ll have to be content with the fun memories of making wine and cheese with some really nice folks. So glad I took photos of the process to look back and reminisce over. Swoon.