We wish you a holiday season of happiness, peace and joy, focusing today on Pedro Ximenez, a “sticky” dessert wine from Spain that’s well suited to warm a winter’s night.

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Given the dramatic increase in popularity of Pinot Noir in America in the past few years, it should come as no surprise that Pinot Days, a festival dedicated to the grape, would be so successful. It is surprising, however, that this festival has never been held in Los Angeles until now.

For some reason I don’t fully understand Southern California often gets short shrift when it comes to big wine festivals. But no longer. After successful runs in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, Pinot Days is coming to LA.

I know it’s hard to think about what you’re going to be doing in January with Christmas looming this week, but the new year is little more than a week away. If you live in southern California and you’re a fan of Pinot Noir, it’s worth your time to block off a few hours on Sunday, January 17th right now.

The Pinot Days Grand Tasting will offer the opportunity to taste more than 400 Pinot Noirs from about 75 different producers over the course of 4 hours, with snacks to nibble on from local food purveyors. Wineries from all over California, as well as a few from Oregon and even farther afield will be in attendance.

Of course, if you’re a hardcore Pinot lover, you may want to participate in more than the Sunday Grand Tasting. Thursday and Saturday nights feature winemakers’ dinners at Sage on the Coast and the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. Check out the event web site for more information on the dinners and other activities, which include smaller tastings at several LA retail stores.

Pinot Days Southern California Grand Tasting
Sunday January 17th, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Barker Hangar
3021 Airport Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90405

Tickets are $50 per person and should be purchased online in advance.

My usual tips for large public tastings apply: get a good night’s sleep; wear dark colors; drink lots of water; go with a full stomach; and spit so you can taste more than 5 or 10 wines and actually remember them.

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So if you had a bunch of grocery stores, and those grocery stores sold wine, but you didn’t really want people to buy any wine, what would you do?

One of the things you might consider doing would be to lock all the wine away in cabinets, so that people couldn’t touch the bottles. You’d want to make sure folks couldn’t, say, turn the bottles around and read the back label or anything.

You might force people to peer through the front door of this cabinet to try to read the name of the wine they think they might want to buy, and force them to remember it until they walk down to the end of cabinet where they are forced to swipe their credit card in order to buy the bottle. That is, if they don’t have to stand on line waiting to us the machine, which is, of course, the only way to buy a bottle of wine.

And then if you wanted to add insult to injury, you might make sure that people could ONLY pay by credit card, and give them a touch-screen kiosk, with a lousy user interface that forces them to browse through inscrutable categories of wine or many pages of search results to find the wine they’re looking for. Then you’d provide them with really crappy information about each wine.

And finally, you’d install a breathalyzer and force everyone who wanted to buy a bottle to use the breathalyzer, and then to swipe their government issued ID just to make sure they weren’t drunk AND under-age.

Think I’m joking? Welcome to Pennsylvania, and the bizarre alternate universe of the Pennsylvania State Liquor Control Board. You want to buy wine in grocery stores, you’re going to have to convince a passive aggressive computer to open the pod bay doors, first.

This new, state-of-the-art wine sales kiosk is rolling out to more than 100 supermarkets around the state, in what to me looks like an attempt to make sure that no one ever buys wine in a Pennsylvania supermarket ever again.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for stopping underage drinking, and I support laws that prevent the sale of alcohol to visibly drunk patrons. But this system is a whole lot of evils rolled up into one. From the big brother breathalyzer that prevents you from buying a bottle if you measure 0.05 BAC (2 glasses of wine for someone who weighs 160 lbs, and .03 under the definition of “impairment” in PA — don’t share a bottle and then walk down the street to get more!) to the locking of the bottles behind plate glass and the clumsiness of a kiosk interface.

Read about this new system in all its glory. Then go join Free The Grapes or donate to the SWRA.

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