Wine and Cheese Show at Madison, WI

Missy and I attended a wine and cheese show in Madison, Wisconsin, last Sunday.

At the entrance, you are given a wine glass, a cloth shopping bag, and a wine list of vendors that you can check off when you find a wine you like. At each booth, you are given a sample of wine or cheese to try. The wine vendors were being very generous with their samples. Because I was driving home, I had to tell each vendor to give me just a small amount.

The fun part of this is trying different wines. At the end of the show, I bought two bottles of Late Harvest Riesling from the Washington Hills winery. Wendy and I like sweet wines. I would have bought some Sweet Mead from the White Winter Winery but they weren't for sale at the show. But I was told that this mead is available in the Madison area.

In addition, I bought some Bee Barf honey (they have to come up with a better name), a bottle of MFP Barbeque Sauce, and a bottle of Di Salvo's Italian barbecue sauce. Unfortunately, I left the bottle of Di Salvo's BBQ sauce low enough for our dog, Jessie, to get into. I never thought Jessie would be able to get a hard plastic cap off of a glass bottle, but she did it. So, Jessie ate my bottle of Italian barbecue sauce (with no obvious ill effects). (I'm sure after she got it open, Oscar helped her eat it.) The Di Salvo's barbecue sauce I tried at the show was an excellent mix of pasta sauce with a slight barbecue flavor. Di Salvo's has a place in Stoughton, just south of Madison, where I can go and buy more sauce.

Admission to this type of wine show is not cheap: $35 per person. But it's better to go to a show like this and buy and discover wine you like than buying 20 bottles of wine to try and then throwing some of them out. Most of the wines offered at this show averaged $8 to $10 per bottle.

This was a fun activity for a Sunday afternoon.