If you enjoyed San Francisco’s inaugural winemakers tasting at Arlequin Wine Merchants last weekend, you’ll want to check out the king of local urban winery events this Saturday, Aug. 9, better known as the East Bay Vintners Alliance’s Urban Wine Experience.

For the third year, the EBVA is hosting its annual group tasting showcasing all 15 of its members, including Rosenblum, which just celebrated 30 years of making wine in the East Bay, plus Dashe Cellars, Andrew Lane Wines and more.

This year’s event will be held at Jack London Square for the first time, and a limousine service will provide shuttle service to and from the Lake Merritt BART station. Pretty sweet and probably accounts for the spike in the price this year: $45 in advance and $60 at the door.

You get a souvenir Riedel glass not to mention wine pairing bites from some of the East Bay’s hottest restaurants, including Glenview’s Bellanico and downtown Oakland’s Franklin Square Wine Merchant. For tickets and more information, visit the EBVA’s web site.

If you’re a Pinot Noir person, you don’t want to miss this. Tomorrow, May 17, I’ll be speaking at Lost Canyon Winery in Oakland about Pinot Noir and food. We’re taking three Pinot Noirs from the winery’s portfolio that range in style. I’ve customized three dishes that I think work very well with the three wines.

My presentation will include the elements of pairing, tricky foods and lots of wine trivia. Win prizes, taste great food and wine and learn about the art of pairing, or l’abbinamento.

Tickets are $30 and $15 for Lost Canyon wine club members. You can buy them at the door. The event is from 3 to 5 p.m. For more information, visit the winery’s web site.

Hey folks, I’m leading a Pinot Noir food pairing event at Lost Canyon Winery in Oakland this Saturday, May 17 from 3 to 5 p.m. The power point presentation will be almost as delicious as the wines.

Lost Canyon is easily making some of the state’s most sophisticated Pinot Noir in a range of styles. Come see what I pair them with and why plus win trivia prizes. The cost is $30 ($15 for Lost Canyon wine club members) and that gets you a taste of three Pinots plus three food samples and three recipes to take home.

Details are here. See you then.

Was great seeing many of you on the urban wine trail this past weekend at the East Bay Vintners Alliance’s inaugural wine trail event. Word has it they stopped counting heads at 400, and from my perspective it was elbow to elbow at more than a few locations.

I started my day at Periscope Cellars in Emeryville, oohing and ahhing over Brendan Eliason’s futures. I was also quite taken with Andrew Lane’s value Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. Winemaker Andrew Dickson was selling the last of the 2002 vintage for $15 a bottle. Score!

But the real joy there was sampling the winery’s future Napa Cabernet, which was so beguiling out of barrel with its smoky and hypnotic blackberry nose and mile-long finish, I can only imagine what it will taste like when it is released in September. The secret is a barrel of Lodi Petit Verdot that Dickson blends into the Cab. He’s making about 480 cases and plans to sell that wine for $28.  It’s a steal. You’ll be able to find it at most Andronico’s stores.

Speaking of out-of-body barrel experiences, at Dashe Cellars, Mike Dashe gave me a splash of a European-style Zinfandel that Slanted Door commissioned him to make to accompany their Vietnamese cuisine. The elegant, well-balanced wine will be the first in a Terroir Series Dashe is rolling out to showcase a different style than his current portfolio. Bottling on the wine, which clocks in at 13.8 percent alcohol, will be rolled out this week. The wines of the Terroir Series will bear a different label than the straddling monkey we’ve come to know and love and will be in Burgundian bottles. How freaking cool is this?

I  ended my day at Two Mile Wines in Oakland, where history happened: I fell in love with a Petit Sirah ($34, TwoMileWines.com) and actually tried to pay for it. This is a first. Perhaps I don’t understand it or am not sure what to eat with it, but I have never been a fan of Petit Sirah. I like my teeth off-white and my tannins soft to moderately chewy, not hard as taffy. But this one, this one is a beauty: think brambly fruit laced with sexy, silky clove.

A little about this wine: It hails from the Rosciano Vineyards in Livermore Valley, where the blistering hot climate provides optimal conditions for concentrated fruit. Natch, for Petit Sirah. The wine was aged for 15 months in a mix of new American Oak and neutral French Oak barrels. And here’s the brilliance: the barrels yielded two very different styles: a bad-to-the-bone fleshy oak monster the boys deemed “Bad Ass,” and a feminine pretty thing they called “Elegante.” They got married and had a love child that will reach perfection by, say, kindergarten.

Maybe I want kids after all.

I tasted some lovely wines this weekend. Two Mile Wines, the newest member of the East Bay Vintners, had their commercial release party at T. Rex in Berkeley on Saturday, Nov. 17.

The winery is two Adams, two Justins, Tom, Bill, Matt and Joseph — eight buddies who are passionate about the craft of artisan winemaking. I love their vision: “We’re not a legacy, but a point in time.”

They don’t make more than 200 cases of any one wine and you can taste that. My roommate Gav and I sampled four of their five releases, and we each discovered some favorites.

Since I’m huge on Viognier right now, I darted to their 2006 ($23). They get the fruit from Bloomfield Vineyards, and I liked their expression better than Bloomfield’s wines: Two Miles’ had a tropical nose, lots of stone fruits and decent acidity. I don’t normally do Viognier with food, but I’d have this one with scallops for sure.

Gav and I both loved the Sangiovese ($42), and I wonder why more Pinot Noir snobs don’t go Sangio. Theirs, from a steep hillside on the Polesky-Lentz Vineyard above the Dry Creek Valley floor, had all that earth, spice and dark cherry flavor. The location promised and delivered the depth.

I also have to give a shout out to Two Mile Wines’ Syrah, which comes from Unti Vineyards, also in Dry Creek. They call it “Bio-dyno-mite!” Indeed, it is. A third of the fruit comes from Unti’s biodynamically farmed Upper Ranch. The combination of meat flavors and structure is going to make Rhone lovers very happy in a few years. At $44, it’s their priciest bottle, but I think it’s made to lay down.

Family and friends buy up most of the wine, so if you’re interested, give the boys a call soon at 510-868-8713. Tell them I said hi.