Mon 12 Feb 2007
I’m a bit under the weather today but I did manage to squeeze in the Wine Expo this Saturday with Richard and Debbie. It was quite good but four and a half hours is not nearly enough time to see everything. I think next year I will opt for the Grand Cru tasting if only to get away from the crowd. There were quite a few nice wines and also really bad ones but the real star of the day was not the wines but the cheeses being sampled at the igourmet.com booths. I tried some really good Gouda and a wonderful Boschetto al Tartufo Bianchetto. They even had a chocolate goat cheese which tasted like a tangy cheese cake. I ended up buying a $10 plate of cheeses to compliment the wine I was tasting. They gave me a plate which had a place on it to hang the wine glass from . This made sure I could walk around the floor without having both hands tied up.
Afterwords we were not quite finished so we hitched a cab to the North End and got a bottle of wine at Stanza dei Sigari, a cigar bar on Hanover street. After about an hour we finished up the bottle and proceeded to find a place to eat on one of the side streets. Surprisingly or perhaps not so surprisingly given the area there was a huge wait at every place. I don’t know how Debbie did it but we managed to get a seat within ten minutes of picking a place even though it looked like there were tons of people waiting before us. An antipasta dish, veal rollatini and pasta e fagioli later I bid Richard and Debbie adu and called it a night.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
February 12th, 2007 at 11:17 am
I’m not too fond of wine (I prefer beer) but I couldn’t live without cheese. Fortunately there are hundreds of good cheeses in Italy.
February 14th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Fond of beer in Italy and not wine? Ahhh!!!
Hehe. I found Italy’s wine to be the best. For cheaper than a pitcher of water I could get some high quality table wine at any cafe I visited. I think you are missing out on a whole world. Even more so that you live in Italy.
Fear not though. I started out as a beer lover (well actually mixed drinks first). I am still a beer lover (I go to all the beer fests around here too). It is just that with some foods you pair with beer and others with wine.
BTW if you really like beer you need to live or at least visit Belgium, Germany or various places in the US like the North East.