According to the Urban Dictionary, by celebrating the “Sunday Funday” you can extend your weekend festivities just a little longer before hanging up your party pants.
Our party pants may have been loungewear, but you could say that we’ve done a little funday celebrating around here, over the last couple of weekends. The reason for that was that we were sent two bottles of wine to taste, and Sundays were the best days to do that.
The wine was made with products from RJS Craft Winemaking, who, according to their website, “have been helping amateur winemakers perfect the art of craft winemaking for over 50 years”.
If you’ve never tried craft wine before, you might be wondering if wine made by amateurs would be any good.
Now, I wouldn’t say that we’re particularly in-the-know where the finer nuances of wine characteristics are concerned, but we do drink it regularly and enjoy trying new and different kinds. And based on what we sampled, our opinion is yes, wine made this way does taste good.
RJS makes kits that are available at various shops throughout Canada, which offer you an exceptional winemaking experience from start to finish.
There, customers choose what they’d like to make from a wide variety of grape juices and concentrates sourced from all over the world — a look at RJS’s product list indicates that you can pretty well craft any kind of wine that you’d like with their supplies. Then you mix it up and leave it there, properly stored, to age for four to eight weeks — different wines require different lengths of time. You later return to bottle and label your wine and you take it home.
We received a bottle of white and one of red to try out.
The red was called Winemaker’s Trio, which was made from a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and Zinfandel grapes. The white was made with grapes from Argentina, and was one of RJS’s Restricted Quantities products.
For our first Sunday wine-date at home, we had the bottle of red with an afternoon treat of baked Brie, fresh bread and a homemade Pear, Rosemary and Red Wine Relish (I used a splash of the wine to make it).
To prepare this : heat your oven to 350. Place the cheese, with rind on, as is, without puncturing it, in an oven-proof shallow container, or use a brie baker if you have one — thanks mom, for ours! Bake uncovered for 15 minutes. In the meantime, make your Pear Relish.
Pear Relish with Brie
Ingredients
- one Bosc Pear – with the skin left on, cored, and chopped into small cubes,
- about 1/3 cup of chopped white onion, a clove of garlic – minced,
- about a teaspoon of fresh Rosemary – finely chopped,
- about 1 tablespoon of olive oil,
- a dash of salt,
- about 2 tablespoons of red wine.
Instructions
Heat a frying pan and add the oil. Saute the onion, pear and garlic for about 2 minutes, until softened. Stir in the rosemary and salt. Finish by stirring in the wine.
Serve hot with slices of baguette. We had the relish on the side because we weren’t going to eat all that food in one sitting, but if you’re serving more people, you can just pour the relish over-top of the whole cheese round. This makes a good snack or appetizer for 4 to 6 people.
Description
Pear relish snack
Ingredients part 2
Instructions part 2
Description part 2
Ingredients part 3
Instructions part 3
Description part 3
Ingredients part 4
Instructions part 4
Description part 4
↑ Sporting a mustache for Movember ↑
Now, moving forward a week to this past Sunday afternoon, we opened the second bottle, the white wine.
We had this after lunch, while we played a game of Monopoly.
We were equally lucky with the dice which made for a pretty long game — long enough for the sun to set and candles to be lit.
Thank you to RJS Craft Winemaking for sending us the wine and thank you for dropping over to see what we’ve been up to. I hope you have a great weekend. Wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends.
xo loulou
