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Pala food and wine festival

By Michele Parente
San Diego Union-Tribune
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When you’ve got a wine program as notable as Pala Casino Spa & Resort does, you celebrate it 365 days a year.

There are tastings in The Cave, regular winemaker dinners, an impressively extensive wine list at The Oak Room steakhouse and 50 wines offered by the glass at the new Bar Meets Grill California casual restaurant.

Once a year, the celebration turns into an all-out pairing party: the Starlight Food & Wine Festival.

The third annual Starlight festival, which will be held Saturday, features more than 50 premium wines from Napa, Sonoma, Santa Barbara, Paso Robles, Italy, Australia and beyond.

To go with all that vino will be dishes made by more than a dozen of the resort’s top chefs. Beef tenderloin, lamb, lobster, crab, shrimp, ahi tuna, short ribs, Kobe chili, cheese, and lots of chocolate will all be on the menu.

Among the prestige wines being poured are Del Dotto cabernet sauvignon and sauvignon blanc; Duckhorn merlot; Trefethen riesling, merlot, red blend; and ZD Winery chardonnay and pinot noir (all from Napa); Copain Wines pinot noir (Sonoma), Achaval Ferrer malbec (Mendoza, Argentina); and Banfi Vintners brachetto d’acqui (Piedmont, Italy).

The lineup will satisfy fans of every type of wine, such as:

The celebrity rosé (Drew Barrymore, Monterrey);

The refined sparkling rosé (J Vineyards, Sonoma);

The classically complex sauvignon blanc-semillon (Cape Mentelle, Margaret River, Australia);

The balanced chardonnay (Chateau Ste. Michelle, Washington);

The other cab, cabernet franc (Writer’s Block, Lake County);

The big red, cabernet sauvignon (Daou Winery, Paso Robles);

And the inky, purple, even bigger red, petite sirah (Pennywise, Napa).

Starlight Food & Wine Festival

When: 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday

Where: Pala Casino Spa & Resort, 11154 Highway 76, Pala

Tickets: $75 (no fee if purchased through the Pala box office)

Phone: (877) 946-7252

Online: palacasino.com/pa_event/starlight-food-wine-festival

michele.parente@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @sdeditgirl

Eat | Drink
Michele Parente

Michele Parente is the Dining, Wine + Lifestyle reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her areas of expertise include the Valle de Guadalupe wine region, fashion, television, women’s issues and coverage of aging, such as the impact of Alzheimer’s and dementia and family caregiving. Michele is the former Sunday and features editor, where she oversaw profiles, special projects, such as the Legacy of WWII and in-depth reports on a variety of topics. She joined the U-T in 2003, supervising coverage areas that have included features, fashion, TV, Food, Consumer Health and Arts & Entertainment. Previously, Michele was the assistant features editor at The Oregonian, in Portland, as well as the Portland City Hall reporter. She spent 10 years at New York Newsday as a reporter on the crime, education, state legislature and New York City Hall beats. She was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting. A native New Yorker, Michele received her B.A. in political science and Italian Literature at UC Berkeley. In 1980, she studied at L’Università di Urbino, in Italy. One of her life’s goals is to make her way through each of the world’s great wine regions.

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