On Thursday night 03/13/08, international womens charity organization Spark and the Napa Valley Vintners lit up the Rotunda and accompanying floors of San Francisco City Hall and provided quite a night of charity, wine and beats. “Nightlife Napa Valley,” hosted by the Napa Valley Vintners to benefit Spark was a huge and sold-out success.

Spark was started in 2004 by Founder and Founding President, Maya Garcia. Along with fellow co-founders Nealan Afsari, Rohini Gupta, Karen Hennessey, Fiona Hsu, Mona Motwani and my long-time friend Kathleen Kelly, Garcia set out to start empowering and celebrating young women around the world who are trying to change their local communities for the better. Their work covers four areas of support: Community Building, Education, Advocacy and Grant-Making. In just a few short years, Spark has had a tremendous number of global successes, starting with providing desperately needed support to a burgeoning support group by and for Rwandan genocide widows, to most recently beginning grant support for the local OASIS for Girls that holistically supports young immigrant and low income girls with no-cost resources and programs that span the arts to job and leadership training in the SOMA district of San Francisco.

Beth and I had a free Wednesday evening the other week so we decided to head over to one of the newer local wine destinations in the East Bay, Artisan Wine Lounge and Cafe. The lounge sits just off the much busier Locust St in downtown Walnut Creek. The map says Stave Wine Lounge and Cafe, because the business partners that own Artisan, Lena Chu and Kevin Ng, also own Stave, situated in Napa.

Lena chooses wines from small and cult California wine producers, as well as those that remind her of her years living in Spain. This is also shown in the great small plates menu that they offer. Beth and I weren’t that hungry the night we were there, so we just chose a couple “Small Bites” to nibble on, the Marinated Olives and the Artisan Cheese Plate. We really liked the Manchego cheese, which went quite well with just about every wine we tried that night. The stronger blue cheese that was offered was also outstanding, but we had to leave it towards the end when we had some tastes of the dessert wine.

In honor of my beautiful mom’s birthday, Beth and I traveled up to Napa to join my sister Shauna and my parents Donna and Ed, for a day spent on the Napa Valley Wine Train (NVWT).

The Wine Train has had a long and sometimes contentious history in the Valley. The movement to start the NVWT was headed by Vincent DeDomenico of Rice-A-Roni fame, among many other food brands. The long legal battle was bitterly fought throughout the valley with many residents against the idea, including my own grandfather Bud Schroeder. Local protesters argued that the Valley was already fraught with enough tourists, a rather reasonable view, actually. Eventually the legal battle ended up in the California Supreme Court, where DeDomenico et al prevailed. The original dissension has dried up over the last 18 years of operation and, for the most part, the Wine Train is now an accepted part of Valley life.

So there’s another annual “100 Top Wines” list on the block these days. It seems like this aspect of the wine industry gets blown out of proportion more and more every year (see the marketing ploy for the 100 from Wine Spectator this year??), but this new one is more interesting than any other, at […]

Originally published at my personal MySpace Blog

My wife, Beth, and I have made many different wine trips around NorCal and we’ve built up a string of places that we really enjoy. As various friends and co-workers learned this over the past few years, I’ve started writing some rather extensive emails of recommendations for places we like in different regions.

So far, I’ve made a Napa Valley, Carmel-by-the-Sea/Carmel Valley (my favorite AVA), Sonoma Valley, Russian River/Alexander/Dry Creek Valleys and a small one for Amador County (where I actually haven’t spent much time). I thought that these would be great to post here and keep kinda updated.

In honor of the home team, I’m going to post about Napa first. I have included links to each individual website, as well as the accompanying information we have on WineLog [WL]. Enjoy!

Jason and I have returned from our honeymoon and are getting back into the work swing. After filtering through nearly 1,000 emails (mainly having to do with various erectile dysfunction medicines), I thought a post on our all-inclusive resort’s “wine” was in order. (FYI: We stayed at the El Dorado Seaside Suites in Kantenah, Riviera Maya, Mexico. Very romantic and great food!)

The resort’s house wine included three options: red, white, and sparkling. While the resort did have a list of wines available for purchase, Jason and I weren’t willing to pay 4x markup, even if it was our honeymoon. Mango daiquiris and mojitos were fine enough. Sadly of the three options offered, the only one that was semi-drinkable was the sparkling wine.

New Years Eve will be upon us this weekend. New Years is not just an excuse to go on a diet. It’s also a great excuse for partying and drinking Champagne and other sparkling wines. Although, we’ve never needed an excuse for any of that.

I know most folks already have their wine list planned out, but here are three wines you might want to look into if you don’t. I haven’t drunk any of these wines yet, but they are on my own personal list of sparklers to imbibe this New Years. I’ll be sure to post my reviews after the holiday.