Before Retirement, Vance Petrunoff Was Selling Bulgarian Wines from Sonoma, CA

Last night, Sunday, I went to one of the best venues in the San Francisco Bay Area - The Mountain Winery , originally started by Paul Masson in 1852. Concerts are hosted outdoors amid oak casks facing the historic stone-masonry Winery building. You can see the entire Silicon Valley glistening bellow. It was my first time seeing Steely Dan live and the concert was both so cool and so sad for me since some of the songs were sung to me by the love of my life while driving around last year, it has been exactly one year since I met her. I enjoyed her company and talent for brief 8 months and it all ended by the biggest mistake I made in my life. Four months later I am a totally different person, but alas alone. One of the best songs - Hey Nineteen, Then there was another hit "Kid Charlemagne", great vocals by trio of black ladies making the sound of the band really cool. Fantastic drummer and horns section, I loved it, too bad I never listened to them more. Thank you Ruby!

"Традиция от Стария свят за вкусовете на Новия" е рекламният слогон на единствените вносители на български вина в Калифорния - Bulgarian Master Vintners. Българският емигрант Ванс Петрунов не страда от национален комплекс за малоценност и не му липсва дързост да предложи родното вино в сърцето на американската винарска индустрия. Ако не можеш да започнеш бизнес с вино там, където традициите са най-силни, то не би трябвало да се захващаш с това изобщо, твърди президентът на Bulgarian Master Vintners специално за Businessweek България. Според него, ако човек иска да продава автомобили, отива в Детройт, а ако произвежда компютри, се насочва към Силиконовата долина. И така Ванс Петрунов започва да внася вина от България преди 12 години и се установява в Сонома, на 15 минути път от Вълчата къща на Джек Лондон и на няколко преки от най-старата винарна в Калифорния - Buena Vista. През 1995 научава как Домейн Бояр продава над 2.5 млн. каси вино във Великобритания за период от една го...

I was privileged to be interviewed by Gene Burns last Saturday at noon on the most popular wine & dine radio show in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can listen to the podcast and hear Gene and I talking about Bulgaria and its wines if you click on the link bellow. http://cdn2.libsyn.com/kgoradio/dining3_080908.mp3 The Dining Around with Gene Burns program, focusing on Food, Wine and Travel, is broadcast live each Saturday, 10am-1pm on the Bay Area’s number one rated KGO-AM810. The Gene Burns Talk program is broadcast five nights a week, 7-10pm. If you would like to listen outside of our broadcast area these programs are webcast in real time on kgoradio.com Since May of 1995, Burns has hosted the number one rated, and ever popular food, wine and travel program, Dining Around with Gene Burns, on Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm.

Bulgaria's wine exports have registered a significant growth in 2007. During the first nine months of 2007 Bulgaria exported 857 000 hectoliters of wine, which was a 21% increase compared to the same period of 2006 (711 000 hectoliters). Almost 80% of the exported wines were bottled, and the rest were in bulk. The total wine production in 2007 amounted to 138 million hectoliters. A total of over 200 000 tons of grapes were used for their production. Russia is the number one destination for bottled Bulgarian wines with 68% of all exports. It is followed by Poland, the UK, and the Czech Republic. Russia is also the number one market for bulk Bulgarian wines with 65%, followed by Germany, Moldova, and Sweden.

Pros' guide to bargain shopping - link Jonathan Waters Wine Director, Chez Pan isse Strategy: Great values from sustainable, small producers The hits: 2006 Targovishte Traminer , NV Dibon Cava The miss: 2007 Calina Carmenere First, a bit of disclosure on Jonathan Waters' hand up. For his quest, I directed him to the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, where it turned out he already knew wine buyer Simon Ball and scored recommendations before we went shopping. This actually bolstered his first bargain-hunting tip: Get to know your wine buyer. With more Bay Area supermarkets hiring wine stewards and individual buyers, personal recommendations should be ever easier to get. "If you go home and you don't like any of the wines, then the strategy hasn't worked," Waters said. "But at least it's a good place to start." To convert our $70 into eight wines and pocket change, Waters employed other tricks up his sleeve, which to be fair is precisely what you need when...

YOU MUST CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO ***** When Trentadue Winery hired new winemaker Miro Tcholokov, the wines he made immediatly recieved critical acclaim. Miro's wines were so good the folks over at Trentadue Winery didn’t know what to do with them! Known for affordable, everyday drinking wines that sold between $10 and $20 a bottle, the new wines were so good they had to start a reserve line-up (called La Storia) and raise the prices in order to keep them in stock. Miro took a stable, consistent producer of good wines and turned them into a major player in the high-end spectrum of age worthy-collectable wines. Tretadue wines compete with the best wines in Sonoma County, Napa and abroad. You can learn more from Miro in 10 minutes than you can learn from most people in a lifetime. One of the more entertaining and funny winemakers you'll ever meet, he is always willing to spend time with you and talk about wine or anything else. All this at a winery with incredible faciliti...

By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter Thursday, July 3, 2008; 12:00 AM THURSDAY, July 3 (HealthDay News) -- A key compound in red wine known as resveratrol appears to protect against many of the health ravages associated with growing old, new animal research reveals. "It's very hard to extrapolate from this finding to comment on the benefits of red wine directly, because red wine has many other compounds besides resveratrol, including ethanol, which have very active biological effects," noted study author Rafael de Cabo, unit chief of the laboratory of experimental gerontology at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. "But red wine is a good source of resveratrol," he added. "And, in this mouse study, we have shown that this particular compound has very strong positive effects on preventing cardiovascular disease, reducing heart inflammation, keeping bone health in terms of structure and function, and maintaining loco-motor and balance activity. So, if th...