Wine, Cheese, and Chocolate Tasting 2010

Here's the wines: sorry about the picture, I should know better than to photo in front of a mirror. With tasting notes, left to right:

Devitt 2007 Precipice: an excellent wine blend from the Applegate, Oregon.  Slightly acidic, this was a refreshing, direct wine which was strong without being oaky.  Recommended, also surprisingly inexpensive if you can find it.

Vinalia 2006 Dessert Wine, Bozen: not consumed, we ran out of steam.

Charles Krug 2006 Yountville Cabernet Sauvingnon: a bold but not very tannic cab, with noticeable oak.  Some spice and depth on the tongue.  Recommended.  This was one of the wines I won from Pacific Wine Club.

Vincent Arroyo 2006 Petit Syrah Winemaker's Reserve: a tragedy.  This wine was skunked, and had clearly been exposed to high temperatures.  Considering the bottle price ($45) a huge disappointment.  We drank the Vincent Arroyo Merlot 2007 instead, which (despite being in the same box) was an excellent, dry French-style Merlot.

L'Eccosse Malbec 1997: this is not a wine you can buy, at this point; the winemaker moved from Napa to the Wylamette, and this bottle was from a moving sale.  It was a bit too old; while still good, it had lost a lot of its power and depth.  Probably should have been drunk in 2005.  Oh, well, beautiful bottle.

We also had some Piper-Sonoma Brut sparkling wine to kick things off, and for three of us to celebrate getting rid of bad clients.

Now, on to cheeses!  Many people at the party ate way too much cheese, you'll see why:

Going around the cheeseboard clockwise from the upper left, we have:

Bellweather Farms' Carmody, a truly stupendous mild swiss-style cow cheese.  This vanished entirely, both wedges.

Mt. Vikos Barrel-Aged Feta: a very mild, creamy-tasting feta cheese from Greece.  Not as popular.

Gervais with Thyme and Black Pepper: this is a French-style sour cream cheese which I made from a recipe by Ricki Carroll using milk and cream from Straus Organic Creamery.  It was a real success; people devoured the whole 6oz, vanishing the oat crackers, which Kris made, in the process.

Authentic Pecorino Romano, further origin unknown.  Imported from Italy, an great pecorino if rather salty.  Mostly eaten by the one person at the party who was allergic to cow's milk.

Rogue Creamery Rogue River Blue: awarded as one of the best blue cheeses in the world, at a year old this wedge was a bit on the strong side.  Still tasty, but mostly eaten by the two people at the party who really liked blue cheese.

Mozzarella Farms' Bocconcini: a regular, but well-made fresh mozzarella.  Needed a little olive oil to go with it, but got eaten anyway.

This is the chocolate.  By the time we got to it, people were burned out on actual tasting, and a bit sozzled.  So I'll just list what we had left to right and skip the tasting notes, since there weren't any:

Ghiradelli chocolate chunk and cocoa icebox cookies ("World Peace Cookies") made by my sweetie.  A large assortment of chocolate bars from around the world, including Blanxart from Spain, a Sicillian-style chocolate bar from Rome, a Vosges BlackCat Bar from New York, Chocolate-covered wafers from Heidelberg and Padraic varietal chocolate from Missouri.  Of these, the Black Cat Bar was the clear favorite.

We also had chocolate sushi.  This is the very last of the photorealistic chocolate-and-carmelized-rice sushi from Koo-Ki Sushi of San Jose, now out of business. More fun for its novelty value than its taste, especially since it had been in the box some months.  But fun.

Everyone went home buzzed, sated, and educated.  Some folks got cheese-related tummyaches, though.

So, when are you holding your own tasting party?