Listen in as Stretch and Dan visit the 3rd Annual Pinot Days festival at the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport. While there they chat with reps from some of their favorite California wineries, including Rodney Strong, La Fenetre and Big Basin.

The Grand Tasting showcased over 80 phenomenal producers of pinot noir. The boys were able to sample up to 300 pinots from every important pinot noir region, from the Russian River Valley to the Santa Rita Hills, Oregon to the Anderson Valley, Burgundy to New Zealand to the Sonoma Coast.

I've lived in and around Venice, CA, for going on 12 twelve years now, and I must say, things have really changed around here. The gentrification began in earnest a decade and a half ago, and now this once untamed and downright treacherous territory has become a haven of tranquility for the bourgeoisie. That's not to say that Venice is totally devoid of the threat of real street violence, mind you. Just swing by any of the trendy eateries that dot Abbott Kinney Boulevard on a weekend night and you're likely to find some well-heeled bohemians at each other's throats trying to secure a table. I once saw a guy outside Gjelina try and strangle a dead-ringer for Tim Robbins with a wolf scarf from what appeared to be the Tom Ford collection. It was chilling. Tim Robbins really does have a scary, gigantic head.

Make no mistake, the denizens of Venice take their local dining scene seriously, and so it is that each new restaurant that comes along (and they're opening at a pace of about one per week) comes under immediate and intense scrutiny. Often times, this happens before the place even fires up the ovens for the first time.

While on YouTube I decided to check out a video I shot several years ago in London featuring Pernod Ricard's inimitable brand-man Simon Ford, who offers tips on wine tasting. Not sure what the YouTube tech folks did to the video since I first posted it, but it now inexplicably has an unintended "visual effect" to it that makes it look like a classic Talking Heads or Peter Gabriel video. Pretty cool, actually. Here, have a look...

It doesn't get much better than this.

Lunch at one of the world's most celebrated eateries, The French Laundry in Napa Valley, with 50 of the best bartenders in the world. And we got to record an episode of The Imbiber Show inside the restaurant!

Among the libational luminaries we chat up - Jon Santer, Simon Ford, Joaquin Simo, Erick Castro, Dylan O'Brien and Giovanni Martinez. Also check in with Kit Codick, founder of our newest partner, Liquor.com.

The visit to The French Laundry was part of an epic three-day drinking and eating extravaganza called Juniperlooza, sponsored by our friends at Plymouth and Beefeater. It also included a stay at Bardessono, a lobster "throw-down" dinner at Mumm Napa, a party at Bottega, and a much-needed stop at In n' Out Burger on the bus ride back to San Francisco.

Hear all about it by clicking the links below...

There’s a fierce battle being waged over a patch of land in the heart of Northern California wine country, and it has the region’s normally laid-back denizens all kinds of fired up.

On one side is the Spain-based Codorniu, one of the world’s largest wine companies (they own Artesa in Napa, among other prestige labels). They want to clear 2,000 acres of redwoods and fir trees near the Gualala River to make room for vineyards, which will eventually be surrounded by 60 high-end estates.

On the other side are local environmentalists, a.k.a. the job-destroying devils of Michele Bachmann’s worst nightmares. These folks believe the proposed deforestation would be devastating to the area’s ecosystem, along the banks of one of the nation’s cleanest waterways.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE POST AT FOODREPUBLIC.COM

It's summertime, and like many of you, the Imbiber is traveling. All over the place, actually. In this edition of the booziest podcast known to humankind, Stretch holds down the fort in LA while Dan drops by Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (Oscar Wilde's grave, pictured), Terry Hoage Vineyards in Paso Robles, and the Ventura Limoncello Company in Southern California. Fun interviews at each stop, especially at the cemetery... yes, the dead can be quite entertaining!

Links to download and/or stream are right below.

Enjoy!

We're debuting The Imbiber Show on Playboy Radio (Sirius/XM Channel 102) on Wednesday, May 25th, live from 4-6 pm EST. That's 1-3 pm for our left coast friends.

My co-host is the lovely and lovelier Kayden Kross (pictured to the left). My producer is my trusted brother-in-alcohol Mike "Stretch" Roberts. My inspiration is YOU (not really, but it sounds nice, eh?)

We also have a slew of beautiful women (see photo gallery/bios below) stopping by to talk adult beverages, play drinking games and generally make me feel like the luckiest sum'bitch alive.

Love to have you call in to the show and share whatever's on your mind. Again, we'll be airing live from 4-6 pm EST. The studio line is 877-205-9796.

In this early kickoff to the holiday weekend, we'll be making cocktails and drinking wine. Here's some of the adult beverages we have on tap:

-- Spirits expert Silamith Weir will be making a Los Altos Morning Julep
2 oz Siete Leguas Tequila
3/4 oz FAIR Café Liqueur
1/2 oz Combier Liqueur D'Orange
1/2 oz brown sugar syrup (equal parts brown sugar and water)
Sprig of fresh mint for garnish
Crush ice, pack densely into julep cup. Combine tequila, coffee liqueur, orange liqueur and brown sugar syrup in shaker. Shake vigorously, strain over julep cup. Heartily slap the mint sprig then stick it in. Drink

Stretch and I drop by the just-opened Stella Rosa Pizza Bar in Santa Monica to get the skinny on pairing pizza and red wine... and really, there's nothing skinny about it. Deliciously decadent is more like it. Also check out my interview with wine god Peter Birmingham at a Rioja wine tasting at Hatfields in Hollywood.

Here's what our pals at Urban Daddy had to say about Stella Rosa:

This isn’t the kind of place where you’ve got too many decisions to make. You came for pizza and wine, and you’ll get it—either at the 15-seat bar or at one of a handful of tables. We’d suggest settling in up front by the windows, since this is one of the few areas in town with actual foot traffic to liven things up. (“Nobody walks in LA... except on Main Street”: less catchy.)

And besides, they’ll bring the bar to you. They’ve got a roving wine cart here, so before your table is covered with crisp, hot, 12-inch pizzas topped with mushrooms, pepperoni and mozzarella and cooked quick at 650 degrees, you can start exploring a veritable wine country on wheels.

Your favorite kind of wine country.

Stella Rosa Pizza Bar
2000 Main St
Santa Monica, CA 90405
310-396-9250

Mount Nelson 2010 Sauvignon Blanc
Marlborough, NZ

Let’s face it, moving sucks. It is, to the best of this admitted optimist’s knowledge, the one fundamental exception to the pie-sky notion that life is all “about the journey, and not the destination.” My experiences have proven that when moving, it’s better to blow right past the enjoying the ride part and concentrate fully on getting the hell to ones destination. Moving day is no time for lollygagging or sentimental gaping. Not with extorting landlords demanding spic-spanness, over-eager new tenants streaming in, asking to stash their ratty couches in the garage, the utility dogs gnawing at your heels, and the promise of a glorious fresh start awaiting on the other side.

It was in these keyed up circumstances that our mild-mannered mailman Enrico happened to arrive at the front door with box in hand. Typically, a late-arriving package is the last thing anyone wants to see at their stoop when defying the laws of spatial physics by way  of shoehorning their junk into a rental truck, but this package was not just some misremembered EBay prize that we’d have to ferry along. No, it was a perfectly timed gift of liquid lubrication from the Lords of Relocation themselves: a refreshing bottle of Mount Nelson 2010 Sauvignon Blanc, sent along for a review which, in our haste to relocate back to our home in the mountains of Colorado after three years in the fallow flats of California, I had forgotten that I’d been assigned.

My wife, the Redhead, was quite excited about our random score, and insisted on chilling the bottle. Since our refrigerator had already been de-thawed, she set the bottle carefully in a rocky nook in the creek out back, which flowed heavy with spring runoff.  A half hour later she returned excitedly. We were in business, albeit ingloriously, due to our having already packed away the wine glasses. Improvising on the fly, we each poured a glass into our last two remaining unpacked vessels – a pair of plastic “Carbondale Mountain Fair” beer cups that I’ve saved and reused.

I clutched the lip of the cup with my teeth, grabbed a box from the stacks in the kitchen, and wobbled off to the truck outside. The wine splashed up and wetted my whistle as I jostled along, giving me my first sweet, tart tastes of the Sav Blanc. Startled by it’s crisp hold on my mouth, I quickly chucked the box I was carrying into the maw of the Uhaul and sat down for a second to further study the interesting Mount Nelson flavor bouquet.

“Moving is so much better with wine!” the Redhead exclaimed, joining me on the tailgate. We compared tastes. I noticed a strong, lime or tangerine-like citrus note, heavy on tannins. The young wine was surprisingly, pleasing unbalanced, morphing from sweet to tart on its meandering journey across the landscape of my tongue. My wife thought that she caught the scent of strawberries in the bouquet, and strangely, the tang of freshly picked field greens.  

Feeling guilty about sitting down on the job under such duress, we ran back to the kitchen, filled our cups, and continued shuttling our earthly possessions out to our steel camel. Soon enough, we were down to the last two cups, and had moved everything but the couch, most recently a place of great comfort in our home, but now a piggish thing seemingly made of anvils and rail ties. The doorbell rang. It was the new people, wanting in. We clunked our plasticized cups together, downed the last of the Mount Nelson, capping what was an entirely undignified, but well-appreciated tasting, and hefted the couch out to the moving truck.

*Corby Anderson is a freelance writer based out of Emma, a small valley in Colorado’s Western Slope inhabited only by livestock, a few hearty skiers, and the occasional curious coyote.  His works have appeared in the Aspen Daily News, The Monterey County Weekly, Canyon Country Zephyr, and BEER Magazine. www.corbyanderson.wordpress.com