It's a blessing and a curse to be a wine lover living in Sacramento. After all, you're surrounded by hundreds of wineries producing some of the world's best vintages – from urban wineries like Revolution Wines and Rail Bridge Cellars here in the central city to Sacramento County, the Sierra Nevada foothills and beyond to Napa Valley. But when you want to do some wine tasting, that blessing can feel like a curse. How do you choose from all those tasting rooms? And with more and more of them charging tasting fees, how do you find the best deals: from free tastings and fees that apply toward purchases to private tastings well worth the extra bucks? A couple of local wine connoisseurs have

              How do words like helpless, lost and hopeless turn into words like support, confidence, and healing? They do, with the resources and services of the Alternatives Pregnancy Center. The center lifts up an individual struggling with the fear, decision, and consequences of an unplanned pregnancy by providing possibly life saving services including counseling, prenatal care, pregnancy checkups and sonograms, as well as parenting classes and aftercare.               To help celebrate and continue their unmatched work in the community, Alternatives Pregnancy Center is having their “Catch a Falling Star- Annual Gala for Life“, on Sept. 24th, 2010 at 6:00 pm at the Sacramento Hyatt Re

       Eating good food, drinking good wine, and keeping the kids off the streets. These are three of my of my favorite pastimes. Unfortunately, it is rare that I get to indulge in all three at once. Every so often, however, the stars align just so, and offer up an event that allows me to eat, drink and help kids.   The food- and wine-pairing fundraiser for the VIBE Foundation at Le Cordon Bleu Friday night was one such occasion.   The gala was sponsored by Infuze Marketing, who work with local, lesser known wineries at a variety of events throughout the Sacramento area. Infuse selects a specific nonprofit to benefit from each one of their events.   The VIBE Foundation is creating a

To truly understand what makes wine great, it helps if one knows how it is made. The process of creating wine involves more than just the type of grape, the soil and if it is meant for a bottle, jug or box. And although all of these variables factor into the final product, the character of a wine is determined during the aging process, while stored in barrels. Usually the public isn’t provided the opportunity to witness what makes great wine, and more importantly, to sample it before it hits the wine list at The Firehouse Restaurant or the shelf at Trader Joe’s. Not anymore.  For the third consecutive year, over 20 El Dorado County wineries will open their cellars for Bring out the Barre