*** Lockdown night in ***
Hi I have just held this virtual cheese night for some of my friends, so thought I’d share with the world so you can have a night in with some of your family and friends.
I had this video running in one window on zoom and we were all chatting while it was running. It actually worked a lot better than I thought. If you only have one zoom account in your house then you can do a screen share.
There is a ten minute break between cheeses so you can chat and discuss your wine and thoughts about the cheese. If you are as lucky as we are you can get your local cheesemonger to cut you a portions of cheese that are ready to open and eat. I use the Cheese Plate in Buntingford (www.thecheeseplate.co.uk ) and Toby the owner is very helpful and suggested the selection for this evening. He also has a postal service if you can’t get out!
So the cheeses for this evening are
Godminster
Beaufort
Al Romero
Cirone
Reypanear
La Peral
Suggested wine pairings
Pinot Noir Frizzante or Rioja Joven
Roussette de Savoie or Beaujolais
Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Grigio
Saint Desirat Syrah or a Vin d’Alsace
Champagne, Sauvignon Blanc or a Merlot
Desert wine Red (Elysium), La Magendia de Lapeyre or a nice port
Personally I had a shorter wine list with some Prosecco to start while we were waiting for everyone to join the zoom meeting. I then had some Sav Blanc, a White Zin and finished with my fav desert wine Elysium. But you can go with whatever you have in the house and you enjoy most. The idea is to have a fun evening with your family and friends.
This is how I suggest you run the evening.
1. Schedule a meeting on your favourite conferencing platform, I used zoom.
2. If you can, have this video running in one window or as a separate user in the meeting and share this screen so everyone can see the video running.
3. Give it a minute or so at the start of the meeting then start the video. It has a three minute intro at the start to allow everyone to settle and get the ‘hellos’ out of the way.
4. You can then enjoy the evening along with everyone else as the video then does the rest.
5. The whole event runs for about an hour but you can pause the video if you need a bit more time between cheeses.
When I ran the evening some of our friends in France were unable to get the same cheese as the rest of us but it did not detract away from the evening as they could tell us what cheese they were enjoying.
This was a very successful evening and we are planning to run another in a few weeks and if there is a demand for this, I’ll happily put this new night up too. This time 6 of us are selecting our favourite cheese and then I’ll do some wine pairing and another video like this.
If you would a personal version, drop me a note and if I have time, which I do during lockdown, I maybe able to pull you a personalised version together as long as you are happy sharing it with the world!!
I hope you have as much fun with this as we did.
Regards
Hitch