Jessica Koslow

Pulled Pork Sliders and Quinta de Saes

It's rare that a small wine bar has an onsite sommelier. It's even rarer that a restaurant has a female sommelier. Vintage Enoteca has both in Danielle Francois who, along with Jennifer Moore, owns the Hollywood wine bar.

Their philosophy is simple: Wines should be accessible, affordable and, most important, people should like what they drink. The two ex-New York City advertising execs gravitate toward boutique productions and family-owned estates, which produce indigenous varietals, in Europe, California and the Pacific Northwest.

"I pick out cool, off the beaten path wines that you don't find everywhere," says Francois. One of her specialties is food and wine pairings. Throughout the year, she plans themed pairings, but she's also available on the spot for customers who are adventurous -- or unsure -- and looking for suggestions. This weekend, June 14-16, she's put together an All-American Snack Food Mashup and Wine Tasting with sophisticated twists on classic snack foods like Cracker Jacks, pork rinds and Oreos. Turn the page for five of Francois' food and wine pairings.

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T. Nguyen

Barefoot Wine

While you're waiting for the Supreme Court to issue its ruling on the gay marriage cases -- it'll probably be around the end of June, so plan your cautiously optimistic celebrations accordingly -- there are lots of things you can do. Like, say, pick up a few bottles of wine for your next Hollywood Bowl outing. Maybe a few bottles of wine explicitly dedicated to the cause: Per the Associated Press, a number of wineries are expressly supporting gay marriage, some going as far as putting their position on the matter right on the label.

The AP highlights four wineries in particular: Same Sex Meritage (slogan: "Eat, Drink and Be Married") offers a red table wine; Egalite sells a French sparkling wine; Stand Tall Wine Co. makes a Pinot noir; and Barefoot Wine & Bubbly has a variety of red and white wines. All wineries feature some sort charitable component; Same Sex Meritage, for instance, donates $1 of every bottle sold to Freedom to Marry, and Stand Tall Wines donates 1% of its sales to the Napa LBGTQ Project.

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Pitfire Artisan Pizza

Pizza + wine at Pitfire Artisan Pizza

Drop into one of L.A.'s seven Pitfire Artisan Pizzas and the casual approach to dining is apparent. Order at a counter, find a table (either inside or out) and wait to dig into freshly prepared and flavorful wood-fired cooked pizzas, salads, soups, paninis and pastas. What's not so apparent is the restaurant chain's equal commitment to its wine selection. Although the wine might not be served in Riedel crystal stemware - the wine list is carefully curated to pair with Pitfire's crowd-pleasing, straightforward menu.

Some in the wine business have a reputation for cultivating a certain snob appeal, which is the opposite of Pitfire's approach. As Pitfire's beverage czar (his actual title) Lawrence Rudolph explains, "The more we democratize and make wine a less fussy experience, the more successful we'll be. What we seek to do, is give people a quality experience at an affordable price in an unpretentious way." So how does that unpretentious mode play out? Turn the page for details on Pitfire's user-friendly and very quaffable wine program.

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Jeff Kirshbaum

Winemaker Seth Kunin at AVA Santa Barbara's tasting room

Like a lead singer with a side solo project, AVA Santa Barbara is winemaker Seth Kunin's side gig. Because Kunin Wines is a well-established, Santa Barbara County-based brand -- known for its Rhone-style blend, syrah and zinfandel -- Kunin decided to create another label, AVA Santa Barbara, to explore and make smaller batches of other varietals rather than dilute his well-known, "personality-driven" Kunin Wines label.

Opened in February, AVA Santa Barbara's glass-and-steel, very contemporary-looking tasting room in Santa Barbara's low-rise Funk Zone is the only place to find Kunin's small-batch production of varietals like chardonnay, cabernet franc and grenache. Taste the bright 2010 Los Alamos Grenache and then look up to see where it's from -- the tasting room's entire wall is covered in a vivid, chalkboard map that creatively illustrates the Santa Barbara wine country, its various microclimates and American Viticulture Areas (AVAs) with a few harbor seals frolicking offshore thrown in.

Close to the beach, the Funk Zone -- an area of industrial-style buildings and businesses between the 101 Freeway, train tracks and the beach -- is a very cool place to taste wine. Although, as Kunin explains, this wasn't always the case.

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B. Rodell

Rosso Wine Shop

Three Bottles, One Shop is a new series in which we take a peek into an L.A. wine shop and ask the owner to pick and describe three great bottles on offer. Have a shop you'd like to see featured? Email brodell@laweekly.com.

Rosso Wine Shop sits on a quiet strip of retail stores near the corner of Verdugo Road and Verdugo Boulevard in Glendale, right up the street from the Montrose shopping and dining area on Honolulu Avenue, a small-town-feeling main street that hearkens back to a time when our main shopping destinations included independent toy and book stores rather than big boxes. For the past seven years, Jeff Zimmitti has been at Rosso, preaching the gospel of country wines -- the small producer, everyday wines of Italy and France that he fell in love with while traveling in Europe during his past life as a musician in the early 1990s.

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Barbara Hansen

The red wines with labels: Cinsault and Mourvedre

Would you call this heaven or hell for a wine lover? Getting forty-three Cabernets to taste but not drink, 27 Viogniers to sample and spit out -- and so on, through some 3,200 entries in this year's Los Angeles International Wine Competition.

More than 70 judges willing to take on the challenge gathered last week in the gold-striped Vineyard Ballroom of the Sheraton Fairplex Hotel and Conference Center in Pomona. The behind-the-scenes action was as fierce as the judging, given the logistics of storing, transporting, labeling and pouring so much wine, then washing thousands of glasses a day.

No musings over the ethereal qualities of a wine, no discussions, no pleasantries -- just swirl, sniff, taste, spit and score. And get it all done in two days. But these were pros: winery owners, winemakers, sommeliers, wine educators, wine brokers and reps, some with decades of experience.

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Mohawk Bend

Hangar 24 IPA and North Coast Old 38

Breakfast in the Bend
The Echo Park beer pub is hosting a brunch to benefit Share Our Strength, with Golden Road brews at $4 and three $10 specials: chili-cheese baked omelettes, Bend breakfast burritos, and the namesake waffles with fresh berries. A dollar from each pint and $5 from each special sold will be donated to the nonprofit organization.
WHAT: Breakfast in the Bend
WHEN: Saturday, May 18, 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
WHERE: Mohawk Bend, 2141 W. Sunset Blvd., Echo Park; (213) 483-2337.

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B. Rodell

Bar and Garden in Culver City

Three Bottles, One Shop is a new series in which we take a peek into an L.A. wine shop and ask the owner to pick and describe three great bottles on offer. Have a shop you'd like to see featured? Email brodell@laweekly.com.

"We've always cared about what we eat," says Bar & Garden owner Lauren Johnson. "And while sourcing our food and trying to eat organic and local as much as possible, one day we were sitting there over a meal with wine and we looked at each other and said, 'What the hell are we drinking?'"

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flickr/simplyla

Vineyards in Yunnan, China

In less than two decades, wine has gone from sideshow to main attraction at dinner parties in China. According to a The Wall Street Journal article, "China as a Vast Wine Market," wine sales grew by 20% between 2011 and 2012 -- to about $41 billion.

Meanwhile, as highlighted by PRI's The World, a recent study on the impact of climate change on wine indicates that China is the "fastest growing wine-producing region in the world." The combination of increasing demand and a changing environment conducive to wine production makes China a region worth keeping an eye on in the years to come.

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acaben via flickr

Napa Valley vineyard

A new study out this week looks at the wine industry through the lens of climate change. The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that many of the current wine producing regions in the world will be less suitable for wine production, and that at least some wine production will need to move to higher elevations.

So what does that mean for California? We spoke to Dr. Lee Hannah, who was lead researcher on the study, to find out more about what climate change means for the future of the California wine industry. He said that, as a scientist, he couldn't predict the business outcomes for the industry, but that there's no doubt things will have to change.

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