Westside Wine Club Member's First Film Festival

Jen, her husband Mark and Dee Dee's husband Danny's first short film together, The Ricochet, got into its first film festival! It will be showing at the LA Shorts Film Festival on TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010 at 10:00 p.m. at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theaters located at 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood CA 90046. Tickets are on sale on the festival's website and are $12 each. Your ticket gets you in to the 10:00 p.m. slot, which will show 8 short films.

The Film Festival:
www.lashortsfest.com

The Website:
www.thericochetfilm.com

The Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YdXC_-52y4

Thank you all for your support!!

Welcome Chicago!

Some wonderful ladies in Chicago are starting their very own wine club with an inaugural meeting this month.  We look forward to keeping up with their adventures on their very own blog.  Cheers!

Happy 1st Birthday Westside Wine Club!

The Westside Wine Club is turning 1! Dee Dee will be hosting this month on July 23rd, time TBD.

Please RSVP via evite and bring a bottle of an anniversary edition wine or anything else that would fit in the birthday theme.

Can't wait!

Sonoma Wine Tasting

During my last trip up north in June, we spent a day wine tasting in Sonoma and Healdsburg with a focus on the region's renown pinot noirs and zinfandels.  Sonoma and Healdsburg are great; the towns themselves are quaint and charming with some nice restaurants, and the surrounding vineyards and wineries are picturesque and relaxing.  It's much more laid back than Napa; during my last Napa trip, we needed appointments at pretty much every winery we visited, and made our dinner reservations a month in advance.  There was also some pretty bad traffic on the main roads.  In Sonoma, most places we visited did not require reservations (more like Santa Barbara), and the people were super friendly and laid-back.  We tasted some fantastic Pinot Noirs at Sojourn Cellars and Copain Wines (pictured above) and nice Zinfandels at Mauritson Winery.  We wanted to try more zinfandels at wineries around Mauritson in the Dry Creek Valley, but unfortunately we ran out of time.  We also had a lovely dinner at the Girl and the Fig in downtown Sonoma and a casual lunch at Bovolo in Healdsburg.  For more pictures and details, visit here.

Wine Tasting Event @ Bin 73

The June wine club event was held at local wine bar, Bin 73, in Marina Del Rey, which is next door to Mercedes Grill, both owned by Mercede Ahrablou. She put together a special menu for the club which included 5 generous pours paired with 5 delicious appetizers. Thank you Mercede for providing such a wonderful evening for us!!

Here we are enjoying the first wine, a bubbly rose, which was paired with the beet fruit salad.

The delicious ahi tuna poke was paired with a crisp Spanish white wine.



We all loved the filet mignon panini, paired with a smooth Roth cabernet.

And of course we had to have dessert! Love the signature '73 on the cookie, which we hear is the year the owner was born.

Here is crew with Mercede, our server Ryan, the self described wine snob, and our super friendly busboy.