Last week's Cheese & Cider Pairing webinar was, by attendance, one of the better-turned-out virtual sessions we've run since this all started. Part of that is the subject — pairing questions come up constantly at the counter, and cider is a friendlier entry point for a lot of customers than wine — but part of it is just that members have gotten good at showing up to these. A year ago we were still troubleshooting who could hear whom; this time the chat ran faster than the presenters could keep up with.
If you missed it, the short version: dry ciders with real tannin structure hold up better against washed-rinds than most people expect, and the pairing that got the most chat traffic was a sharp, bone-dry cider against an aged alpine-style — a combination several attendees said they'd never have put on a menu themselves. A recording link will go into the course portal for anyone who wants the fuller walkthrough, along with the tasting notes several members asked us to write up separately.
It's worth saying plainly that a year ago, a session like this one would have been rougher. Industry coverage of virtual and hybrid events through this stretch of the pandemic has tracked the same pattern we've seen ourselves: organizations that leaned into video early kept refining format, pacing, and audience interaction well past the point where the novelty wore off, while events that treated video as a stopgap tended to stay clumsy. We'd put our own webinar program in the first group at this point, mostly because members kept telling us what wasn't working and we kept changing it.
Something on the calendar that isn't a webinar
Further out, and worth planning around now: a Stone Alpine Styles workshop is scheduled for early April, one of the few in-person sessions currently on our calendar. Broader event-industry reporting through this period has consistently described organizers converting a first-quarter calendar to fully virtual while eyeing a return to in-person or hybrid formats later in the year — and this workshop is exactly that kind of later-in-the-year bet, timed for a point when hands-on instruction may be possible again in a way it hasn't been for months.
Travel this spring is still an individual call, and we're not going to tell any member how to weigh that risk for themselves. But for members who make or work with alpine-style wheels and have been waiting for hands-on instruction rather than another screen, this is the one to watch.
Registration details will follow as we get closer, along with whatever public-health guidance applies at the time. In the meantime, if you attended a past Stone Alpine session and have questions about whether this one covers new ground, the Events Committee can tell you how the curriculum has shifted since the last in-person cohort.
What's next
Between now and then, the virtual calendar keeps running as usual — check the education portal for the next round of webinars, and let us know what pairing or technique topics you'd want to see covered. A year of doing these online has taught us that the requests we get from members are usually better than what we'd have picked ourselves, and last week's chat log is proof of that: three separate attendees asked for a smoked-cheese pairing session before the recording link even went out.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.