Wine and cheese pairing has a long history in many cultures, with viticulture and the art of cheesemaking evolving alongside each other throughout human history. Everybody loves good wine, and pairing a bottle with carefully selected foods can greatly enhance the culinary experience. Many industries have grown out of the popularity of pairing food and wine, with thousands of print and online sources providing vast amount of information on the best flavour combinations. Finding new food fusions involving wine and cheese can involve a large amount of experimentation, as the subjective nature of taste makes it difficult to provide generalized advice. Attending tasting events is a great way to discover new ways to combine tastes, but can be expensive and hard to attend regularly.
Creating distinct and piquant wine and food pairings requires a firm grasp of several key criteria, with which an experienced culinary aficionado can balance flavors. Experts take into account factors such as the ‘weight’ of the food- in the context of food and wine pairing, weight refers to the heavy flavors of foods such as red sauce pasta versus lighter foods such as salads, and in wine the alcohol content, palate and region. Keeping these ideas in mind when selecting food and wine can be difficult when you’re limited by the selection of your local produce or lack of free time to research combinations.
There has been a recent surge in the popularity of online concierge services that focus on delivering curated products that are typically highly subjective, such as fashion or wine. Designed to take the stress and hard work out of discovering and trying new products, these services often work as a low cost monthly delivery subscription that provide customers with personalized products based on their own specific tastes.
Wine Down Box is a new breed of online concierge that focuses on delivering customized wine pairing options to adventurous wine drinker and cheese enthusiasts. Functioning as a personal, dedicated combination of fromagier and sommelier, Wine Down Box promises to deliver a monthly curation of small batch wine and hand crafted charcuterie sourced from exotic and uncommon small artisan producers across the world. In this article, we’ll take a close look at the Wine Down Box service and provide a breakdown of their key benefits to help you decide whether Wine Down Box is right for you.
Who Are Wine Down Box?
Wine Down Box provide a unique solution different from other wine, cheese and smallgood delivery services. Created by a team of passionate food and wine enthusiasts, Wine Down Box scours the world every month. Every month the team behind this revolutionary and groundbreaking new subscription service assemble a combination of small batch wine, artisanal cheese, hand crafted charcuterie such as salami, prosciutto crudo, and cured meats, and healthy, delicious crackers. Designed to offer a monthly surprise in the form of the best possible combination of flavours, Wine Down Box takes the hard math out of food pairings to let you sit back and enjoy their selections.
The pairings provided by Wine Down Box are broken down into three sections- wine, cheese and charcuterie, with a comprehensive review of the source and age of each item. With products from California, France and Italy, the combinations offered by Wine Down Box are professionally assessed and are complete with information about their key flavour notes and palate impression. All of the monthly pairings from Wine Down Box come with Nita Crisp flattened bread crackers, small batch crackers that are hand cut, cooked and packed directly from the farmers market.
Wine Down Box also offer a gift service for those loved ones, family members and friends who are impossible to find the right present for. Perfect for wine connoisseurs and foodies, Wine Down Box offer a gift box with curated pairings in a range of monthly subscription lengths that can be purchased upfront, providing a gift that keeps on giving throughout the year.
The Wine Down Box Story
Based in San Diego in the United States, Wine Down Box is the creation of Tony Martinez, a food and wine enthusiast and entrepreneur. Founded in 2015, Wine down box was created by Martinez when he was looking for a similar service online and noticed a gap in the market. Having grown up in the Napa wine growing region in Livermore, Martinez has his roots in wine country, with wine and food pairings playing a pivotal role in his life.
Working with a different winemaker and artisanal cheese and meat maker every month, Wine Down Box has presented combinations with elements from vineyards such as Margerum Winery in Santa Barbara, and Matucci, an Oceanside based urban winery. Taking into account flavor factors such as sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness, Martinez and his team work to combine food tastes with textures in wine such as tannin, alcohol content, oaky flavour and the fullness of the wine body. These tenets allow Wine Down Box to deliver the highest quality pairings and products.
Wine Down Box is currently rolling out across the entire continental United States, and ships to over 14 different states. Some states don’t allow the shipping of wine over state lines, but Martinez has plans to overcome this limitation and plans on expanding into 40 states in total.
Wine Down Box Pricing
Wine Down Box has a scaling pricing structure based on how long you’d like to engage them to bring you delicious wine pairings straight to your door. Just one month of curated wine and food pairings from Wine Down Box is priced at $49 USD, with 3 months priced at $144 USD, and the six and twelve month options providing the best value for money at $282 USD and $540 USD respectively.
The price point of Wine Down Box is quite cost effective, with roughly $47 for a bottle of wine, cheese, crackers and artisan charcuterie usually priced far higher at degustation bars or bespoke luxury food providers, and it has the added bonus of being delivered straight to your door.
The Verdict
If you’re excited about trying new flavor combinations of food and wine from all over the world, hand selected to provide the best possible pairings with a scientific and reliable selection method from only the best small-batch providers available, Wine Down Box is definitely the right choice for you.
