Wine, Cheese, and Dosage

Wine Warehouses: Thanks to Nolan Smith for an educational tour of the warehouse at Crossroads Vintners. These guys keep bringing in some of the best and most popular wine brands including a few you'll recognize (like Hey! Mambo, Woop Woop, and Cartlidge and Browne) and a few you wine experts will know are wonderful (like Patz and Hall, Sineann, and even Twisted Oak.) Their spirits inventory includes some fine Bourbons and Junipero gin -- one of my favorites. They even carry the Jeff Gordon Napa wine, but be warned, it requires more of an F1 budget.

With Wine Goes Cheese: Sampled some delicious Indiana artisinal cheeses with a recent wine tasting. A fantastic sweet, pungent swiss (Jegerlehner Swiss), a mellow but sharp cheddar style (Meadow Creek Kase), and my favorite -- especially with the dry white sparkler -- the Pazia, a Parmesan style cheese with a much higher moisture content and the distinctive salty herbal quality of a good parm. All from Swiss Connection.

Quiz Answer: Looks like most of you know your dosage levels. Great work! In champagne, the levels go like this from sweetest to driest:

Doux
Demi-Sec

Sec

Extra Dry

Brut

Nature

Yes, it's true, brut is drier (less sweet) than "Extra dry", and occasionally, you'll see an "extra brut" which is even drier still. Nature or Brut Nature is dryer than everything. 80% of you got it right.