Last Saturday Larry and I went to a special gourmet food and wine tasting fundraiser for Make-A-Wish Foundation. We bid for this event at a silent auction last summer and won two tickets to this tasting event. We feel pretty pleased that we got this bid for the price that we did. We privately donate to Make-A-Wish every year but had never been to a function of theirs. We put on our nice clothes and went to Treasure Island (the island in the middle of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. The views of San Francisco from there were amazing!
View of San Francisco From Treasure Island
For this tasting there were about 35 wineries and 35 restaurants. We walked into a very large warehouse building of which the atmosphere was set up very dark. There were muted spotlights from the ceiling that made each vendor stand out. There must have been about 500 people there. The vendors were flanked around the room. There was a great assortment of wine and food of which most were new to us, although we had heard of most of the restaurants and about half of the wineries. There was music in the background and the place was decorated with black shining flooring and monkeys flying in a circle in the air in the middle of the room. Below the monkeys were the silent auction items. They had some very nice wines, getaways, restaurant and winetasting for the auction.
Flying Monkey Decorations Lori all dolled up for the Make-A–Wish Tasting
We got there very close to the beginning around 5:00 and stayed until it ended around 7:30. We ran into our buddies Thea and Liza. We haven’t seen them since last summer! We will see each other again next week at the P.S. I Love You – Dark and Delicious event in Alameda on February 19th.
Some of the wineries and wines that stood out to me were Ladera Vineyards Pinot Noir, Whitehall Lane Winery Cabernet, McPhail Winery ’07 Pinot Noir Anderson Valley, Cakebread Cellars Zinfandel, Patz & Hall Pinot Noir, Verge Wine Cellars Syrah, Chateau Montelena ’06 Cabernet, and Chappellet ’07 Cuvee. Some of the restaurants and delicacies that stood out as well were Citizen Cake – chocolate pudding cake with a lemon marmalade, The Moss Room with a snapper ceviche, Namu with a Kim Chee ravioli, the CCA with pork vindaloo sliders, Aqua Restaurant with Ahi tuna tartar with Moroccan spices and a lemon confit, Farallon with New Brunswick oysters on the half shell, Millennium Restaurant with truffled pecan mushroom pate on a crostini topped with a fig red wine syrup on top, The Girl and the Fig with prosciutto and gruyere crostini with fig jam, and Kara’s Cupcakes who served their carrot cake, chocolate mousse and lemon cupcakes.
GATX, Hartmann Studios, Sybase, Weil Gotshal, KRON 4, and Opentable.com sponsored this event.
The nice thing about this event was that there was enough food and wine to match up the tastes properly. Everyone who attended seemed to have a great time. The crew did a great job keeping the tabletops clear and the trays empty. I hope they received some great donations. This is a great cause and it’s all for the kids. To donate to Make – A – Wish, click here.