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I'm back in the office after spending last week in Napa for the <strong>Symposium for Professional Wine Writers</strong>. My final stop before heading back to Sacramento was a tasting at Shafer Vineyards (highlights of the tasting were the gorgeous 1995...

Montevina Winery, which when it was founded in Amador County's Shenandoah Valley in 1970 led to the revival of the Sierra foothills as a fine-wine region, is going away, in a manner of speaking. As of Jan. 1, the...

A little more than a month ago I asked readers of this blog and The Sacramento Bee to let me know what my next wine or feature should be. I had five candidate stories, ranging from olive oil to...

Not much ground was covered this past week in gathering information for the blended-wines story, though I did attend a few tastings that gave me a chance to catch up on the current releases of such iconic California proprietary...

This notion of blogging about a story as it is reported and written has had one especially surprising result. The story is about blended wines, more specifically American-made proprietary blended wines, the availability of which looks to be on the...

The first component upon which to develop a story about blended wines is to determine whether they indeed are increasing in number and popularity. So far, hard evidence hasn't materialized. At my request, The Nielsen Company is looking into its...

Well, I'm surprised. Two weeks ago on this blog and a week ago in the Dunne on Wine column in The Sacramento Bee I asked readers to tell me which of five story topics would interest them the most. I'd...

Sacramento culinarians can stop fretting about whether they will be able to buy their Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas panettone and even Easter ham at Corti Brothers, East Sacramento's longtime one-stop gourmet market. For their Fourth of July hot dogs, however, they...

I've heard that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama has a pretty nifty wine cellar, but his people haven't gotten back to my people (me). His wine collection may be even more impressive than the cellar at the White...

As newspaper managers try to staunch the draining of readers and revenue, one suggestion being debated within the industry concerns a restyling of the traditional gatekeeper role of the media. That is, editors have been gatekeepers, determining what news gets...