Monday, October 11, 2010

Wine, Beer, & Cheese at Swirl


What a better way to ease into the work week than with a glass of wine, a pint of beer, and a few wedges of cheese. Tomorrow night, Swirl Wine Bar & Market is hosting a special event where you can sample all of the above (a few times over).

Those fans of Flight of the Conchords will find much to love, as the tasting features libations from a family of New Zealanders. On the menu are four beers from Moa, which are a bit atypical in that brewmaster Josh Scott ferments his beers in the bottle (just like champagne). Rounding out the tasting list are two wines from Allan Scott Family Winemakers, headed up by Josh's father.

But man cannot live on wine and beer alone. Thankfully, St. James Cheese Co. owner Richard Sutton will be at Swirl talking about the 6 different cheeses that he selected to pair with each wine and beer. Think of it as a St. James Cheese School field trip.


This is a seated tasting and is limited to 20 participants. Reservation and prepayment are required, call 504.304.0635. Cost is $20 per person.

To learn more about this tasting as well as other food and wine events around town, check out the Blackened Out on the Town calendar to your left.

4 comments:

Vasu said...

The beer/champagne comment is backwards. Champagne is fermented in the bottle just like the Belgian and German beers that came before it for hundreds of years. In fact, the Champagne bottle is a variation on Belgian beer bottles, and the original Champagne bottles were just Belgian beer bottles as they were the only ones at the time that could withstand the pressure of bottle fermentation.

Peter said...

Very interesting, Vasu. Thank you for the alcoholic history lesson. We learn something new everyday.

Anonymous said...

I checked out Moa's website, and the idea of "fermenting" the beer in the bottle looks a little misleading. The primary fermentation is done in bulk, like all beers, and then some more yeast and some priming sugar are added to the bottle, which is then sealed. The resulting smaller fermentation is really just to carbonate the beer. Lots of other breweries do this. They call it bottle conditioning, as opposed to the forced carbonation that the megabreweries do. Sierra Nevada is the one that most easily comes to mind. Most of the Belgian breweries bottle condition also.

Nice history about what came first Vasu. The more you know . . .

Anonymous said...

What are the names of the cheeses?