Wine & Cheese, Round II

It's been three years since the last time Wine Club decided to do your class wine-and-cheese pairing. This time around, we tried to get a little fancier with our cheese.

I was decidedly not fancy with my picture-taking, though...I completely forgot to bring a camera other than my phone. It was the cap to a day that started with traffic that made me 50 minutes late to a meeting and built up to me dropping my entire bottle of syrah on the sidewalk seconds after getting out of my car. Never a better time for wine club!

If you're curious and don't mind iPhone pics, here's what we had:

 The cheese lineup, clockwise:

• Port Salut: a semi-soft cow's milk cheese.
• Wensleydale with Cranberries cheese: my favorite! Cow's milk cheese from Yorkshire with sweet cranberries. We ate it melted with dark chocolate on slices of bread.
• Beemster Vlaaskas cheese: A sweet Dutch cheddar.
• Chipotle cheddar cheese: so good and smoky! Would love to try this in chili.
• Espresso Bellavitano cheese: Wisconsin-made cheese, soaked and crusted in espresso. A delicious sweet cheese!

We did a kind of bad job having the right cheese paired with the right wine, but here are the wines we sampled:

• Lucky Star Chardonnay: Citrusy start for a creamy finish, with notes of pineapple, pear and golden apple. I don't normally like chardonnay, but this was good.

•  Aberdeen Angus Cabernet Sauvignon: A delicious Argentinian cab, with dark plummy fruits and a vanilla finish.

•  Woop Woop Cabernet Sauvignon: Strong fruity notes offset by notes of spice.

•  Temptation Zinfandel: Much like the others, plummy and spicy and vanilla-y. We had a lot of very similar reds, LOL!

• Monte Oton Grenache: Lauren especially loved this one, which is described as having notes of raisins, blueberries and plums.