I went to a beer and cheese tasting last night, and I now have a much greater respect of the humble Cheddar. Who would have thought that it could taste so fancy? My favorite was an 8-year aged wax cheese from the Carr Valley in Wisconsin. It had a pleasant crispy taste that I very much enjoyed, but am at a loss to describe. I find it hard to treat cheese like wine and discuss it's nutty or fruity flavors. For one, I am not very good at doing that with wine, and for two, the cheesiness of cheese is very distracting. Maybe I will get better if I do a couple more cheese tastings. They are free and weekly, so that's a pretty good incentive.

Alas, a food critic I may never be. It has always been hard to pin down the taste of one food in another. For example, when find myself at a wine tasting, the wine guy almost always beats me to the punch in describing whatever is 'in' a wine. Do you taste the blackberries in there? Oh yeah, that's what that is... Alas. I am not too upset about that, really, because even if I don't know what other foods I am tasting in there, I know when it tastes beautiful, and we can usually all agree on that.

There is a new-to-me store wine store near Union Square that has the best wine selling trick I have seen. They group their wines by food. All you have to do is pop in with some sort of idea of what you'll be eating that night, and voila -- they have a wine for you. Beef, pork, takeout, Mexican, kosher, environmentally-friendly, cheap, and so on. It is all there, ready for you to grab and run. If they only lived closer to my house.

All this talk has gotten me thinking about dinner and the fact I need to get something for Christy and me to eat. Perhaps there is time yet to make it to the wine store... that is unless I stick with the great beer I bought last night. Off to the store I go.