Friends go better with Wine than Cheese

I had a drink (ok, a few more than a drink) with a customer of mine last night. Needless to say, I think he is a great guy and I think he can be a very good friend.

Which is very different because he's the first native Singaporean about whom I can say this.

We were at the Wine Garage, which is right next to Brewerkz (one of my favorite places in Singapore) and has a fairly big selection of wines waiting to be imbibed. Since both of us have a leaning towards red wine, that was what we elected to go with for the evening.

So the evening began with a bottle of South African stuff. And we experimented with a cheese platter which is supposed to go well with wine. This would be my first experience with cheese (although I confess that I have a liking towards the Mozerella kind and regularly have fairly large quantities of it) and I was quite apprehensive of what was in store for my taste buds.

And I was right to be apprehensive. Only three varieties out of seven that constituted the platter were found pallatable by my taste buds, only one of which I actually liked. No amount of honey or celery would make the other cheese varieties taste any better. And the only way the Danish Blue would be better is if I did not eat it.

But coming back to the wine, we thought the South African was quite nice. It was as smooth as the conversations we had (work, politics, sports...typical guy talk) and I realized that this guy is very easy to speak to. After the success with the first bottle, we chose to get an Argentine replacement. Again a red wine (of modern packaging...no more corks, only a twist off cap), this one I thought was smoother than the first and a lot more drinkable.

Along the way the conversations became more animated and a lot more fun. We had a friend of his join us for the evening and so there were more friends to be made. He just so happened to be a Liverpool fan (and that gave me enough and more opportunity to rib him about their current performance as compared to ManU).

After WineGarage, we headed to a local eatery on Balestier Road to have Ribs soup...local style! It was a lot of fun and I was actually eating local stuff with local guys at a place I have never been before. And I actually liked the food.

So we signed off the day (pretty late that too) on a really happy note and went our own seperate ways. With the hope that more of these kind of meetings will happen in the near future and with the promise that they will introduce me more of Singapore and Singaporean food.

A very profitable day. I added two possible friends to my account.

I hope the interest on that account is good :-)