Jacques Orhon is a sommelier for over 20 years. It is also a columnist on Canadian television. His book on matching food and wine is here in its 3rd edition, revised and re-updated.

His approach is to create groupings based on similarities of ingredients, formulations and colors. For each of these families of dishes, Jacques Orhon goes after a short narrative advise us 10-20 wines, sorted by price. It goes even further by reproducing the labels 6 producers especially recommended that constitute what he calls his “first choice”. It has selected 500 wines out. The book ends with the presentation of 50 recipes concocted by chefs for a specific wine, it has adequate preparations tasty and easy to achieve.
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Almost every community around us in Northern California has some form of an art and wine festival. Some call it a fall festival or a summer festival – depending on the timing. Others use different names. The point is, if you are missing out on your local community’s art and wine festivals then you should go check one out. If your town doesn’t have one maybe it’s time to bring up the idea to the folks at the town hall.

At the time of writing this brief note, we had just gone to the Sunnyvale, California Art & Wine Festival. As a result, a couple of people we went with are still working off a little headache brought on by a little too much of the grape – oh yeah, and those barley and hops too.

Generally the art and wine festivals are much more than art and wine. Typically they have live music, great food including the ever so popular chocolate covered fruit (yup – I’m a health nut…) on a skewer that seem to sell out before I can ever get one, all types of bbq, chicken, pork, burritos, garlic fries, beer, and so on.
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