Join our mailing list

SacWineRegion Save Mart Supermarkets

Bite-sized musings about food and wine from our restaurant critic.

Posts Most Recent

Random notes from yesterday evening's Grape & Gourmet gala at Cal Expo, the annual bash where California State Fair officials reveal the major winners of the fair's commercial wine competition: - Despite my aversion to crowds, this event is...

Hot Wine Tips

Our Wednesday-morning reading brings us a couple of helpful tips for wine enthusiasts: - When visiting wineries to taste and buy wines during summer heat spells, bring along an ice chest with frozen gel packs to keep the bottles...

Jim Caudill isn't on the front line with crews fighting fires in Mendocino County, but as media representative for the Brown-Forman family of wineries he is on the front line of answering reporter and consumer questions about how the North...

The cabernet-franc bandwagon is picking up momentum in the Sierra foothills, to judge by an extensive tasting of the region's wines by the staff of the Web site AppellationAmerica.com. While the tasters handed out the most gold medals to zinfandel,...

Relax, Italian Wine Fans

Come Monday, the spigot that allows the esteemed wine Brunello di Montalcino to flow from Italy to the United States will be back on, officials of the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau decreed today. It's been off...

Word out of New York this week is that Empire State lawmakers have approved legislation to exempt from the state's liquor-control laws ice cream made with wine. According to comments by New York legislators and winemakers, the demand for wine...

First Stop: Sacramento

For nearly two hours this morning, Darrell Corti, president of the Universita Di Corti, otherwise known as the storeroom at the rear of his Folsom Boulevard grocery store, Corti Brothers, lectured 14 gastronomy students from Italy on the history and...

Judges who predicted that the Dry Creek Valley in northern Sonoma County was the source of the grapes that went into the zinfandel that won the sweepstakes at the 2008 Los Angeles International Wine & Spirits Competition were on the...

We Have Winners

After five hours of tasting and voting, and then tasting and voting again, and again, and again, judges at the 2008 California State Fair commercial wine competition finally chose a best-of-show white and a best-of-show red at 1:55 p.m. today.I...

G.M. "Pooch" Pucilowski, who has been running the annual California State Fair commercial wine competition for more than 20 years, summoned his 68 judges to take their places at 8:48 a.m. today for the 2008 edition of the event, which...

Copyright © 2008 The Sacramento Bee