From the wine cellar - Michelle shares thoughts on summer wines!

New at BSM - Charles Smith Wine Collection

History - Charles Smith is a self-taught wine maker who is not afraid to step outside of the box and make wine the way he sees fit. Members of our Wine Merchants Staff comment that upon visiting with Charles Smith, it quickly becomes evident how passionate he is about making good wine and using bio-dynamic methods. While he has many different varieties to enjoy, we at Brick Street have selected 3 of our favorites to share with you.

Vino - 100% Pinot Grigio - 86 points - Mineral driven. YES. Terroir running through the entire wine. Aromas of fresh cut hay, tangerine, orange blossom, honeysuckle. Echoes again on the long - satisfying finish.

Pairings - grilled seafood, fresh oysters, and keeping it light with pastas with butter & sage.

2013 Chateau Smith Cabernet Sauvignon - 90% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Malbec, 5 % Petit Verdot, 4% Merlot. Rated at 89 points. If you like cabernet dark & rich, this is your best. Chocolate, dark cherries, tobacco leaf. It continues with and earthiness and a noticeable minerally finish.

Pairings - Beef Bourgignon, lambchops with balsamic reductions.

2013 K Milbrandt Syrah - 100% Syrah. Rated at 90 points. Textbook Syrah and this is it! Think of game, black olives, and crushed stone and a bouquet of fresh flowers thrown in! WOW!

Pairings: Hearty beef stews, pasta bolognese, wood-fired pizzas, and grilled meats.

Stop in and select a bottle for enjoying with your friends and family today!

Candied nut recipe

I used the following:

1/2 c. water

1/4 c. brown sugar

pinch of cayenne

1/8 tsp. salt

1/4 c. mixed walnut pieces, almond slivers, pepitas (little toasted pumpkins seeds) or any others you have. 

Make a simple syrup using brown sugar, water, cayenne ( or red pepper flakes), sea salt (or kosher).

Simmer until sugar is dissolved. Stir in your nut collection. Simmer 3 - 5 minutes, just enough to coat.

Place on baking sheet and in oven at 400 degrees, turning while nuts brown (every 3 - 5 min.) Remove when nuts are toasted brown in color.

Let cool. Break apart.

Great with blue cheeses especially!

Tasting/Sampling Events

Sampling or tasting events are a necessary evil of many small 'foodie' retail shop owners. If you live in a community, have a store that features someone else's 'wonderful' food item, it is highly likely you will be invited to attend a fundraising event for some non-profit organization. The price of your ticket is your donation to said event of your sampling of foods for the entertainment of said non-profit's guests.

Of course, many times these opportunities are brought to your attention by your own customers, and many times they are good customers who support you as well. Sometimes this is not the case, and you get to judge how much you want to be 'seen' throughout your community as a benefactor by selecting or turning down these events.

I attended just such an event last evening and was once again reminded how really pointless these events can be for a small retailer such as myself. This is a well-attended event, with long lines at the food vendors' tables, so when people arrive at your table, it's a given that they will pile their plate with selections with very little regard for any behind them in line.

At my particular table, on a single toothpick, you'd see a pepper jack cheese skewered to a salsa and cilantro cheese, followed by a piece of salami wrapped blue cheese. You have to try to get a small explanation of each piece going on the toothpick in random fashion as these individuals are moving through your line. And yet, really, there is little hope that any individual flavor will stay with the taster as they cram a piece of bread, cracker or any other little nosh from someone else's table into their mouth.

I have had very little return on the investment of my 'donation' or my time at these events, but I continue to do them - WHY? As a small payback for the loyalty of my customers to my establishment, I suppose. These are their pet projects, and they do serve a purpose in the greater community in which we live through their service of housing for cats & dogs, or historical education for the community, or even music programs at local schools.

So, I will continue to agree to participate, or not; I will continue to spread the word - and I will continue to marvel at some of my fellow human beings 'table manners'!

 Brick Street Market does really have the best holiday cheese collection in Walworth County! I am thrilled to be able to present some of our favorites for your holiday gift presentations.
We have Carr Valley's Menage, Cocoa Cardona, 4 year cheddar block, and Apple Smoked Cheddar. Or perhaps a Sartori selection - bold asiago, crunchy Sarvechio, and any number of Bellevitano flavors! Marieke goudas from foenegreek, to black mustard seed, to smoked. Blaser's Antonella's in several savory flavors. Roth Kase and Sugarbrook with Gruyere, Butterkase, Buttermilk Blue Affine and holiday spreads, too!

Not to mention our European Collection - Bucherolle - a delicate and lovely soft ripened goat cheese with white fuzzy external mold. Beautiful served with a heated apricot compote and your favorite Champagne or buttery Chardonnay. If you're in the mood for international, we can 'fly' you from Italy to France to Spain and back! Need something unique but small - Pave Sauvage is a goat chevre from France that is rolled in Tarragon and 3 peppercorns: Place on a few sprigs of juniper or evergreen for a unique intimate plated presentation. Need something more outlandish - try a Langres - the beautiful squiggly ripened cheese  with the final  of pouring champagne into the well of the cheese.

Got all your cheeses selected and purchased? Perhaps, you just need a between course palate cleanser for the big meal? I have just the thing for you. We recently received a Fromage Blanc made by Vermont Butter and Cheese Company. We made up their recipe for a light and refreshing dip, and I have been using it in store with sliced broccoli chips and florets as an appetizer. Stop in for a tub and a recipe card.

Some thoughts on a staged Carr Valley Christmas dinner pairing:
I recommend serving the Menage as an aperitif with a light bubbly. You can serve the Cocoa Cardona after the salad with a buttery Chardonnay. After soup, I'd serve the 4 year Cheddar, I'd be looking for a great merlot, full of black and red summer fruit to complement the saltiness of the aging cheddar and amplify its sweetness. After your entree course, I recommend finishing with the Apple Smoked Cheddar and a sherry like Duet, classically deep amber colored with hazelnut overtones. The fortified wine is a perfect foil for the heavier cheddar, and it's overlying sweetness enhances the fruitwood smokiness.
Enjoy!

This week's special wine & cheese feature!

WI Cheese meets French Wine

Okay, I understand all about the 'terroir' thing - a cheese of a certain origin being matched with a great libation from the same region. But, sometimes, a great friend can live in a completely different place from you. We found that this past week when we sampled Holland Farms Smoked Gouda with a wine from France called Corbieres Col de Vent ( french for neck of wind). This particular wine is a blend of Syrah, Grenache and Carignan grapes. The Carignan grape varietal was the feature of this month's Saveur magazine Special Feature, in a review by David Rosengarten. It comes to us from the south of France, just 60 miles north of the Spanish border in the Languedoc-Roussillon region.



I find it most helpful to smell the wine first. This helps me to identify some of the components before I coat the inside of my mouth with either cheese or a myriad of elements of the wine. The wine by itself is blueberry and raspberry fruit-y from the beginning, and is a medium easy drinking red wine with just hints of spiciness and black pepper. I found the wine to almost have a watery finish - but when paired with the smoked gouda, the spiciness and black pepper enhance and lengthen the effect of the natural smoke flavor!

A number of our customers were pleasantly surprised with the pairing, and took home this bottle of wine with a small piece of the beautiful cheese. Congratulations to Holland Farms Marieke & Rolf and to the Castlemaure folks for a delightful pairing!

Corbieres Col des Vent - $12.00 - 10% off all week at Brick Street Market!

Summer Cheese Tips - June 2010

Summer cheese and wine tips!

If you are looking for something unique, we have a wine tasting this weekend with Beth Moyer on Saturday from 1 until 3 p.m. As always, I will have the cheese picked to match Beth's Summer Wine selection, and we'll have great fun! Join us and be entered into a drawing for a BSM Gift Certificate! Free and open to all!

It's time to relax, to take a deep breath, to move your living out of doors. Many might think that summer is not the time for cheese - it's heavy, it's thick on the palate, it doesn't match up well with all those light summer foods!
Here are some examples of how well our cheeses really do match up to your lighter summer fare:

A light appetizer tray featuring these 3 cheeses is a guaranteed hit:

1. Menage by Carr Valley - a lovely blend of three milks (cow, goat, sheep) matured into a light and elegant, yet creamy white cheese, paired with a crisp, chilled Sauvignon Blanc or our new Basa. This would be a standout on a tray featuring fresh pop-in-your mouth blueberries or strawberries, and a great crisp cracker like Madison - made Potters crackers.

2. Now add a savory or flavored cheese like Hook's Sundried Tomato Basil Cheddar or Holland Farms Gouda with Foenegreek. Either of these would be perfect companions with a thin sliced Molinari Sliced Salami. Pair this with a summer red like a Tempranillo or a Zinfandel.

3. A third could be the elegant and creamy Buttermilk Blue from Roth Kase, and a top favorite here at BSM. Let this cheese warm to room temperature and spread on crackers (Potter's Hazelnut Graham) and drizzle with a local honey, like Wisconsin's Natural Acres raw honey!

Bring on the grill, bring on the cheese!
Laura

Small business owners constantly re-inventing themselves!

It's a challenge to offer new and exciting things in a small business! But it is critical if you want to keep your customers coming back to you, in the face of overwhelming competition. That is why over the past year of doing business we've really tried to add to the services we offer. We've incorporated specially appointed 'tutored tastings', after the success of our in-store classes got such rave reviews. We now offer our customers a 'pick a night' for their group to enjoy tailored tasting just for their group.

And, our latest store event is our monthly wine tasting, held cooperatively with Beth Moyer of Purple Feet Wines. Last weekend, summer employee, Cameron, (in town for his brother's wedding) joined Jennell and myself for a great wine event! This was our second, and we now offer them each first Saturday of the month, along with a cheese sampling. We featured a lovely fondue using what was left of our Christmas Chardonnay.

The Christmas Chard is from Beau Joubert Cellar. It is light yet elegant, with a gentle touch of oak, and finishing with a hint of apple and vanilla. (Like my mom's old recipe for French apple cobbler!)

We had a great time!

The cheese fondue was a recipe from the "Melting Pot" cookbook - with Roth Kase's Butterkase, Carr Valley Fontina, and L'il Boy Blue. (Email me for the recipe.)

We also sampled Carr Valley's Black Sheep Truffle with a Milton Park Shiraz - the creamy nature of this sheep milk cheese was just perfect with the black cherry fruit of the wine. Wow! What a combination it turned out to be! What a great event for a cold February day.

That's entertainment!

With the economy still slowly chugging back to 'normal' (someone define normal, please!), many folks are staying home and entertaining friends and family. We have your entertainment needs covered here at Brick Street Market! I love creating event trays for any occasion, and our customers are finding these trays a unique way to impress their friends and family. We consider the occasion and the guests - like the trays I put together for the a new 'friend' who brought us her authentic French bread boards to build them on. (You too can bring a tray for us to 'decorate' in style!) I like to play a bit with shapes and not just place a pile of cubes - so yesterday's cheese! And, we include the things that go with the cheese selection!

Come and see us or give us a call! We can help!