Let's wrap up the week with a lingering note from last weekend's Riverside International Wine Competition. Actually, the note has nothing to do with the competition per se, but with a ritual the night before. That's when the arriving judges are to bring to a welcoming reception and dinner a wine they'd especially like to share.

The wines were spread out on a table on a patio of the Mission Inn. Judges browsed the array, picked what grabbed their curiosity, and had a taste. Sometimes they talked about it, sometimes they looked for a potted plant in which to dump the rest.

I tasted one wine that so knocked me over I quietly grabbed the entire bottle and put it on the table where I'd be sitting when we convened for dinner. The wine was the wonderfully bright and fleshy Kelly Fleming Wines 2004 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. It was dark, juicy, sweetly plummy and perfectly balanced, with notes of both Napa Valley herbalness and hillside tar. And it lasted and lasted. It's my strongest candidate yet to be added to the next revision of my 10 Best Wines of the Year - So Far.

At about $85 a bottle, someone was really generous to bring and share the wine. I suspect that person was fellow judge Celia Welch Masyczek, a veteran Napa Valley winemaker now making the wines of Kelly Fleming. She didn't let on that she'd brought the wine, but she snagged a chair at the table where I'd put it.

In Sacramento, the wine is available for $86 at David Berkley Fine Wines & Specialty Foods. It's also available by the glass ($27), the bottle ($99) and the magnum ($199) at Paul Martin's American Bistro in Roseville. Why there? Could be because Kelly Fleming is the wife of Paul Martin Fleming, the entrepreneur behind several restaurants, incljuding Paul Martin's.

Chocolate, caramel and salt. Put them together and what's not to like? People who are discovering the "salty caramel chocolates" at Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates at 18th and L in midtown Sacramento are learning just how marvelous the combination can be. It's become perhaps the most popular item in her lineup of spring chocolates. To learn how she makes them, and to pick up some tips on how to work with chocolate, sugar, butter and cream, we dropped in to her shop the other day. Meet Ginger Elizabeth Hahn:

What in the world were Robert and Margrit Mondavi doing in Sacramento last night, other than the obvious, which was savoring dinner at The Waterboy with a couple I didn't recognize? Dinner at The Waterboy is reason enough for a trek from Napa Valley to Sacramento, sure, but I suspect more was on the agenda than a meal with old friends. Probably had something to do with the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science nearing completion at UC Davis, underwritten with a $25 million donation from the legendary Napa Valley vintner.

Then another thought occurred: Could the Mondavis possibly be scouting out Waterboy owner/chef Rick Mahan as a candidate for a Robert Mondavi Culinary Award of Excellence? Never mind that the awards haven't been given out for about a decade. Though Mondavi subsequently lost his pivotal Napa Valley winery, the awards conceivably could be revived by the corporate officials who now own the place. Up to now, however, they haven't picked up many of the threads that Mondavi so famously wove into the fabric of the nation's culinary consciousness. But we can hope that they again will be proactive in promoting the smart, artful and, yes, moderate consumption of wine and food, always one of the abiding principles of Mondavi's philosophy. Revival of the awards would be a savvy way to reemphasize that connection between food and wine while also recognizing Mondavi's many contributions to the state's wine industry, and why not start with Rick Mahan?

Quick, who is the only Sacramento chef ever to receive a Robert Mondavi Culinary Award of Excellence? Why, Biba Caggiano, who got the tribute in 1996, the same year that five other chefs were recognized, including Cindy Pawlcyn, who at the time had 10 restaurants in San Francisco and Napa Valley, including Mustards Grill and Fog City Diner; Nobuyuki Matsuhisa of Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills; and Norman Van Aken of Norman's in Coral Gables, Fla.

The honor included a 30-square-foot portrait of each chef by Santa Barbara artist Rise Delmar-Ochsner. Caggiano's still looms over the bar of her midtown restaurant Biba. Space for such large art is tight at The Waterboy, but if the awards are resurrected maybe Mahan could hang a portrait at his new place.

It's springtime, and the Dunnigan Hills in northern Yolo County are alive with the sound of...earth-moving equipment, concrete mixers, power saws and the like. Or if not now, Friday, when Sacramentans John and Lane Giguiere break ground for a $2.5-million winery capable of producing 150,000 gallons of wine a year when it is completely built out.

They expect to have the first phase of the facility finished in time for this fall's crush. They've had big plans before and succeeded. The Giguieres, with John's brother, Karl Giguiere, founded R.H. Phillips Winery in 1983, starting with 10 acres in the Dunnigan Hills and building it into one of the nation's larger wineries before they sold it in 2000, when it was producing 800,000 cases annually. By then, their first small vineyard had grown to cover 1,800 acres.

Their new venture is Matchbook Winery, to rise on a 320-acre parcel at the junction of Yolo County roads 92B and 15B three miles west of Zamora. The couple already tends 73 acres of wine grapes on the property.

Matchbook Wines is a winemaking operation the Giguieres created two years ago under the umbrella of their Crew Wine Company, headquartered in Sacramento. They have four brands - Matchbook, Mossback, Sawbuck and Chasing Venus; wines for the first three are made in leased facilities and will be consolidated at the Zamora site, while the wines of Chasing Venus are made in New Zealand.

The Giguieres won't have a tasting room at the new winery until they finish the next phase of construction, to follow in a year or two, says Lane Giguiere.

Word came in too late last night to make today's Bee story about challenges facing restaurateurs in Old Sacramento, but here's another sign of confidence in the city's historic district: Janie Desmond Ison is coming back to Old Sacramento.

In 1994 she opened Steamers at Front and K streets, built it into a popular coffee stop for tourists and locals alike, and then sold the business in 2000. It closed this past Dec. 31, but Ison and her husband Jim, who also own Cafe Vinoteca at Fair Oaks Boulevard and Watt Avenue, which they will continue to run, have been enticed to return to Old Sac and reopen Steamers.

When they revive it, expected between mid- and late-June, Steamers will be more varied and ambitious, though initially open just for breakfast and lunch. The Isons are putting in a full kitchen, they're getting a beer-and-wine license, and they'll be adding dinners on weekend nights during peak times for the district (watch for their striking interpretation of banana-cream pie).

Why the name Steamers? Janie Ison said it originally represented both the steam wand on an espresso machine and the steam trains of Old Sacramento, but after they get the new Steamers up and running they'll also at least occasionally serve steamer clams.

The Isons are so confident in Old Sacramento's dining scene they've signed a 15-year lease for Steamers. "We're very bullish on Old Sacramento," says Jim Ison.

After 35 years, a landmark restaurant site in Old Sacramento is dark. The Fat family has closed California Fat's Asian Grill & Steakhouse, which originally opened in 1973 as China Camp.

"It was a combination of things. Number one, the economy. Secondly, there's more competition in Sacramento and the suburbs," says Jerry Fat, chief financial officer for the Fat family's group of restaurants. "California Fat's had been on a marginal basis the past year and a half or so. We're all down as more restaurants come into Sacramento, so it seemed the prudent thing to do."

Old Sacramento is busy weekends and for special events, such as during the Jazz Jubilee over Memorial Day weekend, but on weekdays local residents tend to stay away, adds Fat.

The California Fat's space now is being used for events like receptions and banquets. The family is looking at its options for the building, but it isn't likely to again house a restaurant, indicates Fat.

This hasn't been an especially auspicious year for the Fat family's restaurant interests. The family also owns the building along Alta Arden Expressway that housed Romano's Macaroni Grill, which closed in late March, about the same time the Fats were shutting down California Fat's. On the up side, the lease for the building has another two years to run, and Brinker International, the parent company of Romano's Macaroni Grill, continues to pay rent, says Fat.

I'm all for recycling and reusing, but an incident in New Zealand shows that prudence may need to be raised with our environmental consciousness.

Two women in a restaurant had to be hospitalized after tasting what they thought was mulled wine. Instead, it was a dishwashing liquid with sodium hydrozide. The mixup apparently occurred because an emptied bottle of "Mountain Thunder" mulled wine had been filled with dishwashing liquid. Though a detergent sticker had been slapped onto the wine bottle, enough of the original label still showed to convince a server that the vessel still contained the requested mulled wine.

For more details, check out this article from The New Zealand Herald.

Sunday's final sweepstakes round at the 2008 Riverside International Wine Competition was long and chaotic, in part because it involved many more wines than I thought it would draw. After Saturday's tasting, when my panel and neighboring panels seemed to be nominating few wines for sweepstakes consideration, I figured Sunday's final round would include only about 40 candidates from the some 2600 entries at the outset of the judging.

We ended up with 64 sweepstakes nominees, however, which speaks well of the overall caliber of the wines in the judging, but raises the question of whether that big a field really allows enough time for the serious deliberation that should be given the wines the panelists concur are the very best in the field. Me thinks a better system needs to be created to trim the number of finalists so judges can more patiently and earnestly weigh and debate the merits of the very best wines.

Ultimately, the 64 wines were whittled to five sweepstakes winners, one each in five categories - sparkling wine, dessert wine, white wine, rose wine and red wine. The red-wine field was unusually diverse and tough, but when the votes were tallied the clear winner was a local wine, the warm, dense and bacony Michael-David Winery 2005 Lodi Earthquake Syrah ($28). It topped a field that included four stylish zinfandels, an unusual number of blends, a vivacious tempranillo, a shout from the past in a juicy alicante bouschet, and, curiously, only one cabernet sauvignon. I'm not sure what the weak showing by cabernet sauvignon says, but the first question that comes to mind is whether this is an aberration or crack in the varietal's standing as California's most highly regarded wine.

Today shouldn't be as long or as tough as yesterday at the 2008 Riverside International Wine Competition. Saturday, our four-person panel tasted through 137 entries, ranging from light chardonnays to weighty cherry wines. Today, we're scheduled to taste just 48; zinfandel, syrah and sherry for breakfast, anyone? And after that, we'll have the sweepstakes round, which traditionally involves about 40 wines, though it doesn't look as if we will face that many today. Our panel, for one, didn't nominate a single one of our gold-medal wines for sweepstakes consideration, and from what I've been hearing other panels also have been tight with coming up with candidates. Not sure what it means. A weak field? Stern judges? All that could change this morning, however.

My fellow panelists, incidentally, are Don Galleano, owner/winemaker of the historic Galleano Winery in Mira Loma, Riverside County; Carol Shelton, owner/winemaker of Carol Shelton Wines in Santa Rosa; and Doug Frost, a Kansas City wine and spirits consultant and writer. Galleano has an interesting shorthand comment when he comes across a wine he doesn't like: "Yuba City, I have no reason to go there."

By the way, if you find yourself hungry in downtown Riverside, consider Omakase, the only Japanese restaurant I've been in for some time that doesn't have sushi. What it does have is a boldly modern and creative take on Japanese cookery. A thick cut of seared steelhead trout, served on artichoke risotto, was spicy with arugula and tangy with lemon, while the sweet richness of roasted pork belly was intensified on one hand with a blackberry gastrique and mellowed on the other by potato gnocchi. And don't get me started on the light-hearted joy of the pineapple custard cake. Omakase is at 3720 Mission Inn Ave.

The bright side of a flight delay is that you finally have time to catch up on your reading. Fortunately, I'd tossed into my luggage a couple of new books as I headed for Sacramento International Airport yesterday. One of them is Gary Vaynerchuk's "101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World" (Rodale, $19.95, 236 pages, softcover). By the time I got to Ontario about two hours later than scheduled, I'd covered most of the book and strolled out of the terminal pretty much convinced that "101 Wines" is one of the more entertaining and, as the title suggests, inspiring wine books of recent years.

If the name Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't ring a bell, he's the wild guy responsible for www.winelibrarytv.com, where he simply sits down with a New York Jets spit bucket, a few glasses of wine, and walks viewers through a tasting. He's loud, confident and almost always entertaining. His descriptions often are hilarious. That spunk is seized adroitly in his book, which basically is a series of descriptions of 101 wines he'd recommend to his best friend.

"I have selected wines that break down barriers, create new styles, and ooze charisma," he says in the introduction. He likes blended wines over varietals, and tends to prefer wines with big, ripe, concentrated flavors. "Fruit bomb" is one of his favorite descriptors. His taste often isn't my taste, but I do like the freshness, bluntness, humor and color of his descriptions.

Unlike a lot of wine books that talk of specific wines, his selections generally are current. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they will be easy to find. Vaynerchuk lives in New York City, and several of the wines he's chosen, being European, may be easier to find there than on the West Coast. What's more, several of the wines were made in small lots.

Nonetheless, I found the book's enthusiasm so infectious that as soon as I got to my final destination, Riverside, I headed to La Bodega Wine & Spirits, which locals told me is the city's best wine shop. I walked in with my Vaynerchuck book and with the help of a clerk attempted to find among the shelves 10 wines I'd marked as especially provocative. Unfortunately, the shop didn't have a single one. Maybe I'll have better luck back in Sacramento. I'd sure like to get my hands on his No. 90 wine, the Peirano Estate Vineyards 2006 Lodi The Other ($13), a "dark, dark, dark" blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah, and his No. 15 wine, the Topanga Vineyards 2006 Clarksburg Grenache Blanc Celadon ($28), which he says would "Buster Douglas" similar Rhone-style California wines priced much higher. (According to his Vaynercabulary, "Buster Douglas" means to unexpectedly destory the competition, and is taken from James "Buster" Douglas, who in 1990 knocked out undefeated world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in Tokyo.)

Why am I in Riverside? Not for the amazing hot-rod show under way just outside the hotel, though I do hope to tour it this afternoon, but for the Riverside International Wine Competition about to get under way. Like Vaynerchuk, I'll be looking for wines to bring some "thunder" to my palate.

Before long, Californians no longer may have to fret about getting busted if they have a glass of wine with their picnic at a winery. Not that people who do this actually look worried. Deep in state regulations governing the consumption of alcoholic beverages, however, is wording that suggests that wineries aren't to allow visitors to open and consume anywhere on the premises a bottle of wine they've just bought in the tasting room.

Under legislation drawn up by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) and Senator Patricia Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa), the law is being clarified so wine-drinking picnickers need not run the risk of being charged with a misdemeaner. The measure, AB2004, passed out of the Assembly Appropriations Committee yesterday and now heads to the Assembly floor.

To clear up another wine-related matter, Wiggins next week is expected to introduce legislation to allow home winemakers to share with others the wines they make. Many already happily do this, but Wiggins recently learned that the practice technically is illegal.

According to a section of the state business and professions code, homemade wine is to be for the winemaker's own personal consumption. No one else - "not a judge in a competition, not your neighbor, not even your spouse if he/she did not participate in making the wine" - is to drink the wine, says Wiggins in a press release issued today.

As it stands, the law jeopardizes long-running home wine competitions, including the California State Fair's, Wiggins suggests. She says she will introduce her bill with an urgency clause so it would take effect as soon as the legislature passes it and the governor signs it, perhaps in time for this year's State Fair homewinemaking competition.

The six contenders for the 2008 SushiMasters Finals have been chosen, and the lone Sacramento representative is bound to be one tough opponent. He's Billy Ngo of midtown's Kru Restaurant, who won Best of Show honors in dramatic fashion last year after slicing a finger early in the competition.

The other finalists are Koji Ogawa of Sakura Chaya in Fresno, Tomaharu Nakamura of Sanraku Four Seasons in San Francisco, Akifusa Tonai of Kyo-ya in San Francisco, Takuya Matsuda of Sushi Bar Nippon in San Diego, and Aung Soe of Geisha House in Hollywood. The finalists are chosen through a series of regional competitions about the state.

This year's finals will be earlier than usual, moving up to June 10 at the Sacramento Convention Center. Sponsored by the California Rice Commission, the finals will be open to the public and also will feature sushi and sake tasting. Tickets are $65. For more information, visit the commission's SushiMasters Web site.