This fall, NH.com is throwing the first ever Wicked Wine and Brew Fest at Mel’s Funway Park in Litchfield. It’s being held Saturday, Sept. 12, from 2-7 p.m. and will feature wineries and breweries from New Hampshire and around New England. There will also be food, music and cool vendors to check out, and a portion of the proceeds will go to Meals on Wheels.

I’m particularly excited about this festival for two reasons: I don’t have to trek down to Boston, where most beer and wine festivals seem to be held, and it’s the start of fall, which means that hopefully there’ll be some fresh autumn-inspired brews and vintages to sample. I know it’s a bit early for pumpkin-flavored ales, but a girl can dream, right?

Other brewers that will be at Mel’s on Sept. 12 are Shipyard Brewing Co., Smuttynose Brewery and Woodstock Inn Brewery (plus more to be announced). And don’t forget about wineries: attending will be Candia Vineyards, Farnum Hill Ciders, Piscassic Pond Winery and Zorvino Vineyards.

As part of The Telegraph’s Marketing and Events Committee, I’m helping to plan, promote and put on this event. I think this is the event I’m most excited to be involved with, especially since I’m a homebrewer and regularly attend New England beer festivals. My favorite so far? Beer Summit’s Winter Jubilee in Boston. Definitely keep your eye out for when tickets go on sale in late fall.

Tickets for Wicked Wine and Brew Fest for adults 21 and older who will be sampling alcohol can be purchased in advance online or at The Telegraph’s office at 17 Executive Drive in Hudson for $20. For a limited time, when you buy tickets online, enter WWB09 at checkout and get $5 off each sampling ticket. The ticket price includes admission and unlimited sampling of beer and wine. And, the best part, the first 1,000 sampling tickets will receive a super-awesome sampling glass with our Wicked Wine and Brew Fest logo on it. Sweet!

The day of the event you can also purchase tickets for $20. We’ll also be selling tickets for designated drivers and ages 20 and younger for $5. Children 5 and younger are admitted for free.

Though a wine and brew festival isn’t exactly the event most people would bring their children to, this one is being held at Mel’s Funway Park, which has mini golf, battling cages and an arcade, so there’s plenty to do besides imbibe.

For more information and to buy tickets, visit www.wickedwineandbrewfest.com. Cheers!

New Year’s Eve is the perfect time for a party and a few drinks.

Twelve of us headed up to Maine for a night of skiing and hanging out in a rented condo for the night. We packed our cars full of ski equipment, board games, food and drinks. (And cake balls, of course!)

After a few hours of “skiing” (I like to put quotation marks around it because, as a first-timer, what I was doing on skis was anything but skiing), we headed back in for the night.

My drink of choice for the night was sangria. I’ve been LOVING sangria lately. A couple friends of mine always seem to have it ready at their house, so now I’m hooked. I recently bought them a bottle of wine so I didn’t feel like a mooch, and they brought it to the party to share.

It wasn’t just any old wine off the shelf. It was local wine, from LaBelle Winery in Amherst. I had remembered seeing a recipe for sangria on its Web site, so we used LaBelle’s own dry apple wine in the mix.

So not only was there a pitcher of red sangria, we had a pitcher of white. And I really liked the white sangria! It was just as fruity as red. I definitely plan on picking up more of this in the future!

I thought I would celebrate the ball drop with my glass of sangria, but then we remembered that I brought champagne! Not only did I bring a bottle of Barefoot’s Extra Dry bubbly, a friend had brought the exact same thing. We turned on the TV to watch Dick Clark’s “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve,” and we were ready for the countdown.

As “2009″ flickered across the screen, we all clinked our glasses together in celebration. A cup of Barefoot was the perfect way to do so.

Let’s hear about what you were drinking!

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so drink up!

Almost every major company these days seems to have a line that donates proceeds toward the fight against breast cancer. Here’s another that’s joined in:

Photos of breast-cancer survivors adorn Cleavage Creek wine bottles. What a great idea!

Cleavage Creek Cellars is run by a California man, Budge Brown, who lost his wife of 48 years to breast cancer in 2005. He’s taken his anger and turned it into a line of wines, and he donates 10% of the sales toward research.

The line is now in its second year, with the second set having just been introduced this month. The new wines include a 2006 Reserve Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, a 2006 Reserve Napa Petite Sirah and a 2006 Reserve Cabernet-Sirah, as well as a 2006 Secret Red and a 2007 Secret White.

Each bottle of Cleavage Creek wine honors a breast-cancer survivor with a picture on the label. You can find their stories on the Cleavage Creek Web site.

To date, Cleavage Creek has donated more than $37,000 to research.

Know of any other wines or drinks that help out a good cause? Please share!

Well, that, and the fact that I’d be surrounded by wine all afternoon.

It was a little early to be out at the Seacoast around 9 a.m. last Saturday. But it was a gorgeous New England fall day. I caught up with friends in the registration tent, and I was surprised to see maybe a hundred or 200 people in the tent by the time the day was about to start. I bought my $6 T-shirt (really, you can’t go wrong at that price), gathered my pruning shears, and I was good to go.

The employees brought us to one area of grapes where we were asked to start shearing. We were each given bins to fill with grapes. (It’s a good thing I’ve been working on my arms at the gym — those things got heavy quickly!) With so many people and only so many rows of grapes, it was almost amusing to see people race around to try to grab at more grapes.

After we finished the first section of grapes, we moved onto another type, and then a third. The third section was the most difficult to get at, as there were more leaves covering the grapes, and some of the fruit didn’t look as good as the first two sections, so we were in that area the longest finding the perfect fruit.

The atmosphere was great. Most people were really friendly and having great conversation. It was a great day to get pictures with your friends in a casual, relaxing environment. Only a few louder noises were made when people accidentally got clipped with the pruning shears (yup, I injured myself) or were stung by bees (that was me, too!).

The couple hours we were out working went by quickly. I couldn’t believe we had finished in such a short amount of time. But it was almost lunchtime at that point. I could smell food, but wasn’t exactly sure what was coming out of the kitchen.

Everyone was also given a commemorative wine glass to mark their participation in the event. Here is one of ours filled with the raspberry wine. (Thanks for the photo, Jen!)

In the meantime, we did — what else? — sample some wine. It took me a while to make my decision from the wine list, as well as because I was silently poking fun at the people in line who were ordering beer. (Hello?! You’re at a winery. Get wine.) I chose a glass of the strawberry wine, and what a great choice! It was so light and fun to drink. My pals at the table had bought some bottles of wine, choosing the raspberry and apple. The raspberry was a close second to the strawberry in taste, and the apple wine was very subtle and could probably be paired with a better variety of foods.

Then the food was ready to be served. YES! The meal consisted of delicious homemade rolls, cole slaw, pasta salad, bone-in chicken, and beef carved by the chef. Now THAT’S what I’m talking about. And not only did we get to fill up our plates with that, we also were given a great selection to choose from for dessery. I chose a slice of raspberry cheesecake, while some others at my table opted for the pumpkin, which was fantastic!

The day ended just as casually as it started. I popped in the store again to bring home a bottle of strawberry wine (about $11) to enjoy later, and I was ready to go home and nap.

Flag Hill is beautiful. The owner mentioned that weddings are being done there. (Maybe I should have looked at Seacoast locations when I was deciding where to hold my own upcoming wedding!) It would be a great backdrop for wedding day photos, too. And it would be fun to offer guests local wine.

I’m excited to go to more of these events in the future. Do you have one to recommend? Please share!

Popping open a bottle of bubbly makes any night feel like a celebration. I think it’s the whole anticipation of the corking flying off the bottle (and hopefully you aim the bottle at something other than your rented apartment’s window… yikes…) and all those tiny bubbles flowing out the top.

So when I got my hands on a bottle of Barefoot Wine’s new Barefoot Bubbly Chardonnay champagne, I decided to pop the cork on a Thursday night mid-September. The occasion? A full moon? Spike was playing a marathon of “CSI” episodes I’d never seen? I didn’t burn my homemade macs and cheese? Sure! Cheers!

For those of us who have no idea what makes champagne a Chardonnay champagne and find the world of Champagne vs. champagne confusing, I consulted my favorite little wine book, appropriately called “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Wine.” (Who you callin’ an idiot?) My pint-size guide says that because the bubbly isn’t from the northern French region of Champagne, it’s a sparking wine, denoted by the lower case “c” in “champagne.” Got it. And it’s called Chardonnay champagne, because Barefoot used Chardonnay grapes to make the wine.

It becomes bubbly through the method the vintner uses to carbonate the wine. In Barefoot’s case, they use the tank method or Charmat method (named for the French dude who discovered this nifty technique). I know this because it’s written right on the bottle (smart! I know). “The Guide to Wine” says that the wine is put into a pressurized tank, and yeast and sugar are added to provoke a second fermentation, which produces the bubbles. Then the bubbly is bottled under pressure to keep it bubbly. Apparently, this is the most popular way to make sparking wines, as it’s the most inexpensive, and the bubbles last the longest. Perfect for a winery that wants to produce an affordable, long-lasting champagne that can be stored on supermarket shelves.

So, now I’m sure you’re like, “Bla, bla, bla. WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE?”

I’ve tasted everything from Andre (three bottles for $4, baby!) to Dom Perignon. To me, it’s all drinkable, but not my first alcholic beverage choice. However, Barefoot’s sparking Chardonnay is so mild and subtly sweet, that I actually enjoyed drinking it for the flavor, not for the “let’s all drink Champagne”-feeling of camaraderie. It’s not dry at all or have that kick-you-in-the-taste buds tartness, and it tastes more like a champagne-flavored Cleary Canadian (you know, that fruit-flavored soda) than a bottle of bubbly. The after taste is really pleasant and smooth.

The bottle tells me that this sparkling wine has the flavors of green apples, pears and a hint of vanilla. I can taste everything but the vanilla, but perhaps that’s the ingredient that smooths out the tartness of apples and pears and makes it incredibly drinkable. This is the kind of treat I’d buy to go along with apples, grapes, Camembert and a chick-flick comedy.

Maybe on a random Thursday night mid-October.

I’ll come right out and admit I don’t know much about wine. I know it’s good to experiment, so I’m starting from scratch.

So when I heard about a wine that tells you what to pair it with, I was sold.

Wine That Loves comes in five varieties. It’s currently not available in New Hampshire, so I hopped across the border to a shop in Pepperell to check it out. I walk in, and just a couple steps from the door, straight ahead, was a huge display for the wines.

The names of the wines immediately give away which wine goes with which food:

- Wine That Loves Roasted Chicken.

- Wine That Loves Grilled Steak.

- Wine That Loves Pizza.

- Wine That Loves Pasta with Tomato Sauce.

- Wine That Loves Grilled Salmon.

They are all red wines except for the salmon wine. 

I thought I’d choose two to start with — Pizza and Roasted Chicken. 

I went home and made a pizza and threw togather a salad for dinner. Splitting dinner with a friend, we also split the bottle of wine, which was Italian.

We both liked the red wine, and thought everything we consumed that night tasted great together. The back of the bottle goes in depth in four areas: intensity, acidity, tannin and flavor, which was fun to check out.

A few weeks later, we opened up the Roasted Chicken wine, a Spanish wine. Actually, we had grilled, marinated chicken; I can’t let a wine completely dictate my meal!

While I liked the taste of both wines and would drink them again, there was a downside.

Both wines are labeled as "red table wines." What does this mean? I think the biggest problem for these beginner wines is the lack of a place to go from here. And more information on the dish wouldbe nice, too. I had made a plain cheese pizza to be "safe," but would the wine have tasted just as good with a Hawaiian pie?

It seems like an easy fix, though. With more information on the labels, a consumer could make good choices in the future when buying wine.

Wine That Loves has potential. It’s a fun idea, it’s the opposite of snobby and I could see bringing it to a party for the novelty factor. It could easily branch out for more foods, too. The Web site says the wines are $12.99, but I bought them for $10.99. I’d say they’re worth the price to try out.

I took a trip to Belgium several years back, and was astounded to find the country has such a huge variety of Belgian beers. Obviously, at the time, I was new to the wide world of European beers. It started on the plane ride over, when they offered us Stella Artoise, which is like the Bud of Europe, you can find it anywhere.

It sounded exotic to me until it was offered to me every time I ate at a restaurant in Belgium. It’s not a bad beer, it’s just that when there are so many options, you don’t want to waste your time drinking the same thing. The walls of the bars in Belgium were covered in signs for the country’s different beers, and a wide selection was always offered, at restaurants as well.

I think I tried as many different ones as I could. There’s something for everyone. You could write several books about the variety of Belgian beers, so this blog certainly can’t do the discussion justice.

Although the trip was short, those experiences helped me get started on European and other foreign beers. What I like is that each Belgian beer has its own matching glass-how cool is that? They have various and sundry logos on them. They have huge beer stores where you can stock up on your favorite drink, while picking up the matching glasses that are usually placed right next to it, for ease of convenience. I bought the glass for Hoegaarden Forbidden Fruit, which has a picture of an Adam and Eve-type-couple hanging out in a garden.

  Another beer that I tried recently was from my local convenience store, “Smiley’s” in downtown Dover. Don’t let the outside appearance fool you- the store has a lot more than Bud. There’s a nice selection of Belgian, British, and German beers; ones with funky labels, and ones that are oversized. I chose a Belgian ale (of course) called Leffe Blonde. It comes in four different varieties, the blonde, Brown, Triple, and Radieuse/Vieille Cuvée. I’ve only tried the Blonde one so far.

You’re supposed to drink many beers a certain way- pour some in a glass, then roll the bottle around, on its side, on the table, then pour in the rest to get a good head. I usually just drink it from the bottle. This one was very refreshing. It tasted light like an ale, but had a nice spiciness to it, like it had coriander and fruity overtones to it. It also had a crisp finish. Very drinkable.

I have to also recommend a really nice wine– Walnut Crest 2006 Pinot Grigio. I had heard that this was a good deal and a good wine for the money. I was very excited about it and was not disappointed. It was smooth, not too fruity, but had a bit of bite at the end.

It’s the kind of wine you could continue to drink all day, if alcohol content was not a factor.

According to Walnut Crest’s Web site, the grapes come from the Provincia Pavia region of Italy. It’s described as having hints of pear and lemon flavor, and some vanilla, but I didn’t taste the vanilla. The Web site also says that it can be enjoyed with seafood, light pastas or as an aperitif. But to me it seems rounded enough to be used for a lot of different occasions. It retails for around $7.

Recently I tried the new Moscato from Barefoot Wine. It retails for about $6.99. Moscato stands for “musky”; the grapes come from the Muscat family of grapes. They are used to make table wines, sweeter sparkling wines, or dessert wines. Barefoot describes theirs as “semi-sweet.”

Oh no… it’s way sweeter than that.

We decided to try it with some chicken. Or rather, “chickenfish”. We used Old Bay seasoning, a lemon/herb type of seasoning, on some chicken thighs. It kind of made the chicken taste a little bit like fish somehow. Then taking a gulp of this super-sweet wine did not help matters.

Maybe next time I won’t experiment with a new wine, while at the same time, experiment with my food. I could barely finish it with the dinner. I did finish it of course; I’ve been taught, as probably most people have, to never waste alcohol.

Next, I tried it with some cheese and fruit, namely pineapple, strawberries, and goat cheese. Another good tip- check to make sure you like the cheese before you go testing it with wine. I figured it was a good mild cheese to try out. I now know I don’t like goat cheese. To be blunt, it reminded me of dirty feet. The fumes at the back of the throat were quite noxious. Dirty feet and sickly sweet wine. Delicious.

It was okay with the strawberries, but nothing too exciting. I fared best with the pineapple. It matched the orange and peach flavors of the wine, and somehow complemented the stronger tartness of the fruit. Success!

To sum up, the wine was indeed very smooth. It’s best on its own, probably as a dessert wine. It has its own distinct flavor, and doesn’t need other flavors to mix up the party.

The label suggests spicy Asian cuisine could go with it, so that’s a possibility. Maybe next time… at some point I have to finish the bottle!

Got an email from the state liquor store the other day announcing Spanish and German wines are one sale from Feb. 25 to March 30.  I’m always happy to see Spanish wine go on sale.  My absolute favorite value wine is Hoya de Cadenas — a fantastic tempranillo with a big, bold Spanish taste.  It goes well with everything (everything that’s not wimpy and pallid flavor-wise, anyhow, but who wants to eat something like that to begin with?) and  you can get it for under $10.  I brought some to a wine tasting party a few years back.  One of the activities was a blind price estimation - everybody had to guess and then the person who’d brought the wine revealed the name and price.  Nobody guessed under $20 on this one — and that was a few years back!  If you haven’t met tempranillo wines yet, you should, and this is a great introduction.  ¡Salud, amigos!