life list #176: go to a cheese store. buy cheese.

Our favorite local business in Falls Church is a wine and cheese shop called Red, White, & Bleu. We love this place. They have wine tastings every weekend and all the wines in their shop are personally tasted and selected by the owners. Every time we go there we taste things that we never would've sought out on our own (Sparkling Malbec? Who knew!), learn something new about wine, and leave with several great bottles. They also have a cheese counter and when we went to taste wines on Friday they were having a cheese tasting!

The cheeses that were being sampled were bleu cheeses and we LOVE bleu cheese - the more moldy/stinky/pungent it is, the better!  We came home with a third pound of Shropshire - an orange bleu cheese with "rivulets of blue and green mold." Yum! And then we sat at our coffee table with a bottle of Petite Sirah, a bowl of kalamata olives, and the hunk of delicious moldy cheese (and the hope that the gullywasher/crazy lightning/thunderstorm outside wouldn't send any trees crashing into our yard like last year) and called that Friday night dinner.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Cheesetique, a fantastic cheese and wine shop in Alexandria, and another local place we love. Although, we've been there several times, we've always eaten in the cafe and bought wine, but due to varying circumstances we've never been able to patronize their cheese counter. So now that we bought that delicious Shropshire from Red, White, & Bleu, I can finally cross "Go to a cheese store. Buy cheese." off my Life List. Although, it certainly won't be the last time. I'm a little obsessed with buying expensive cheeses now...in fact, since we polished off the Shropshire so quickly, it's taking a lot of restraint not to run back to Red, White, & Bleu and buy another tasty hunk of something from their cheese case. That place is dangerous!