Sip, Savor, and Share at Cheese the Day!

Sip, Savor, and Share
at Cheese the Day!

SBCE Takes Wine and Cheese Pairing
to a Whole New (Rooftop) Level

By Leslie Dinaberg | May 7, 2026

Read more from our Santa Barbara Culinary Experience cover story here.

Few things go better than wine and cheese, but when you pair them with the breathtaking 360-degree rooftop view of the Kimpton Canary Hotel, then you’ve got a perfect setting to enjoy life’s pleasures.

Kathryn Graham, co-owner of Cheese Shop Santa Barbara, will guide guests through a multiple cheese pairing flight (two for each wine) that includes wines from some of Santa Barbara County’s finest labels, alongside winemakers Sunny Doench Stricker from Future Perfect, Brit Zotovich from Dreamcôte, Samra Morris from Alma Rosa, Sonja Magdevski from Clementine Carter, and Anna deLaski from Solminer.

Chef Shibani Mone, from the Michelin-starred Caruso’s at the Rosewood Miramar Beach, will also be on hand to offer her culinary expertise, as she’s done so charmingly for the past three Cheese the Day events.

Matt Kettmann, Santa Barbara Independent Senior Writer and critic for Wine Enthusiast magazine, put together this powerful group of winemakers without first recognizing they were all women, which tells you what an incredible force they are in the region.

“It’s such an amazing way to celebrate,” said Graham of this now annual event, which started out as an Independent story in 2024 before being opened up to the public in 2025. “I really do feel like it’s more about the winemakers and especially the local winemakers just being in this gorgeous setting.”

As the owner of a cheese shop since 2003 (when Graham and her husband, Michael, initially opened C’est Cheese on Santa Barbara Street), Graham said that when she’s pairing wine and cheese, she’s looking for the flavors to enhance each other. “A lot of them will either overpower one or the other,” she said. “So, I always taste the wine first, and then the cheese, and then I taste them together. And my hope is that that third taste is like a whole new experience.”

She continued, “It should, in my opinion, bring out either new, unique, better, and more interesting flavors when you put them together.”

Any other guidelines?

“There are some kind of loose rules to it, like, what grows together goes together — but it doesn’t always work,” she laughed. “Especially when you’re working with California wines, because they have such a variety.”

For example, one of the wines they’ll be pouring is the Dreamcôte sauvignon blanc. “Initially I thought it would pair with a French goat cheese because sauvignon blanc grows in that part of France, but the California sauv blanc is different,” said Graham. “It was richer, had more mineral notes, versus notes like lemongrass. So, there were different flavor profiles that we were working with. And it’s definitely not a science.”

She continued, “We essentially taste the wine, and then I usually have at least three other staff do it with me, because everybody’s palate is a little bit different. Everybody tastes different things, which is great. And we basically taste the wine, and then it’s like, ‘Okay, what cheese do you want to go with this interesting wine?’ And so, we’ll taste through a good 10 or 12 cheeses per wine.”

In the case of the Dreamcôte sauvignon blanc, the pairings they eventually landed on are a Mt. Alice, made with cow’s milk from Vermont, and a 1655 Gruyère, made with raw cow’s milk from Switzerland.

“We’re trying to pick different cheeses that highlight different aspects of the wine,” she said. “You’ve tasted enough food and wine to know, sometimes the pairing is just like an immediate ‘Oh my gosh, no.’ It’ll bring out a lot of funkiness in the cheese or the barnyard flavors that you’re not wanting to highlight, or it’ll bring out kind of the funkiness in the wine, or it’ll just completely overpower one or the other. You won’t taste the cheese at all in the finish. Or you won’t taste the wine in the finish. And of course, I want you to have full flavor for the finish.”

While many people are familiar with the proper technique to taste wine (the Five S’s: Sight, Swirl, Smell, Sip, and Savor), what is the proper way to taste cheese?

“The two things that I like to impress upon people are, just let it coat your palate. Don’t just pop it in and swallow it. You want to kind of get the creaminess all around your palate, because with the acidity in the wine, you want that to be kind of a nice textural contrast,” said Graham. “And then the only other thing I say is, the rind can often be a big factor. A lot of times people avoid the rind even when it’s edible, but we’re always tasting it with the edible rind, and so it is kind of important. I still tell people, if you don’t want to eat the rind, cut it off, but it does change the experience. There’s quite a bit of flavor in the rind too. So, we’re always erring on the side of the rind.”

The cheese will be a mixture of tried-and-true classics and totally new cheeses that people won’t have tried before. “We have such a resurgence in American artists and cheese making,” said Graham. “It’s really just kind of been growing and growing over the last 20 years, and it’s finally really blossoming, I would say, because you’ve got cheese being made in every state now. There’s some amazing ones and fortunately, a few of those may have made it on the list as well. So, I’m excited to share those with people.”

Come Cheese the Day at the Kimpton Canary Hotel on Monday, May 11, 6-8 p.m. See sbce.events/event/cheese-the-day for tickets and information.