April in Carneros is an annual event held in the Wine Country north of San Francisco, hosted by wineries associated with Hospitality de Los Carneros. Regional events like this one are a bit like a pub crawl, as you tend to see and bond with other patrons following the same itinerary among the wineries. But you drive, not crawl between the wineries, and the collective deportment is more like you’d see at an art gallery than a pub. It’s a weekend worldly winery wheel, provisioned with food, music, and (of course) the proud presentation of the wines.

I'm often inspired by this illusive effevescent wonder. It makes the perfect start or finish to any dining experience and is a masterful accompaniment to meals designed not to overpower the delicate sparkling wine. A tall flute of prosecco is simple: visually perfect. Not much need be done to enjoy it, but it brings added pleasure to anything it is paired with.

Sometimes I think of my life here and wonder what it’s all really about. I wake up in the morning, in San Francisco, put on my “suit” and walk to work in the Financial District amongst strange varieties of faces and rhythms. Yet we’re all wearing the same suit, walking in the same time, working for the same hours, and then we come home. Tired.

Among Americans, the Loire Valley is most often associated with gardens and castles and not much else. We journey the 150 kilometers southwest from Paris and take a day or two visiting Chateau de Chambord and Chenonceau, all the while enjoying the delightful flora and thinking of bygone days when princes and noblemen still roamed the cavernous halls in this ancient land. But the French know better. They know what we foreigners are just beginning to discover—that some of the most interesting, delicious, and affordable wines in the world hail from the chalky soil on which those famous castles stand.

When a wine collection begins to overflow a wine fridge or a collector begins to invest in high-end vintages, professional wine storage may be just the answer. These humidity and temperature controlled warehouses can store even delicate wines and offer ease of access to their clientele. These wine facilities are a phenomenon of the past decade and a half. “Wine as a commodity has exploded in the last few years. It’s a growing market. People are becoming more educated.,” says Tony Leventhal, manager and cellar master of Vintage Wine Warehouse in Queens, New York.

It is a warm night in the month of May. Everything that has come out of the kitchen to your table seems to be shouting at the top of its lungs that it is spring. The baby lettuces with strawberries and marcona almonds, the fava bean raviolis, the hamachi skewers with avocado and pomelo. The gruner veltliner you ordered has paired up famously with these items, and the bottle of frappato that succeeded it has also proven itself an amiable companion to both the pork tenderloin with asparagus and pea tendrils with gnocchi and romesco, and the pan- roasted halibut with arancini in a green garlic sauce.

In the winter, they stretch above the ground like old crows’ claws reaching for the sky. Amid the bright green of the groundcover and vivid yellows, reds and oranges of the flowering cover crops, one could easily mistake these black stumps for dead. But they are just dormant for now, mustering the energy to push out yet another year’s worth of fruit that will produce the liquid gold that old vine zinfandel can be.

I think the book was one of those Europe-on-five-dollars-a-day books that were so popular when I was a lad of seventeen. Mine was a used copy from a garage sale and my makeshift bookmark, a torn page from my high school yearbook, was stuck in the section on Bordeaux. The torn yearbook page had Musette’s picture on it; the French exchange student from my school two years prior, the most exotic girl I had ever met up to that time, the girl who kept those fancy French cigarettes and a flask of vodka in her purse. And here I was, with her photo in my ratty travel guide standing on the banks of the Gironde River in some little place called Pauillac.

The first time I really thought about Soave wine, it wasn’t in a very complimentary way. My husband and I dubbed Soave “airplane wine” because it was served on every single flight we took into or out of Italy. We groaned when we saw the labels on those tiny bottles. Couldn’t the airlines think of some other kind of wine to serve?

RENEGADE WINE EXPERT CREATES NEW PRODUCT TO ENHANCE THE WINE/FOOD EXPERIENCE: VIGNON , BY NAPA SEASONING COMPANY, TO LAUNCH IN JUNE! ENJOY ANY WINE WITH ANY FOOD. I remember the first wine that flipped my pancakes. It was in the early 1980s, when tasting Sebastiani’s Blanc de Noir, Eye of the Swan—a blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. I’ve always looked back at that and laughed, belittling my own baby steps towards acquiring a taste towards superior , drier wines.