Another great day at the Food and Wine Festival – but just a short blog entry today since it’s late and we’re tired after a short night last night between watching World of Color and then trying to get the video uploaded.

The highlight of today was definitely the Wine Seminar by Lasseter Family Winery – John and Nancy Lasseter were there presenting in addition to their winemaker Julia Iantosca.

New this year, the Festival is charging $1 for a ticket to each of the Wine, Beer, and Spirits seminars. Tickets go on sale an hour before the event starts – once you have your ticket you are free to leave and return just in time for the event, though you of course won’t get front-row seating. 🙂 We thought Lasseter Family would be fairly popular, so we arrived at the Festival Showplace about 15 minutes before tickets went on sale, and there was already a line – though it was a lot longer by the time they started selling tickets! I think anyone who showed up only 45 minutes in advance was out of luck.

We returned about 10 minutes before the seminar was due to start, and were surprised that there weren’t more people in front of us.

This particular seminar started about 10 minutes late – because it was John Lasseter there were a lot of Disney people around and camera crews and all of that.

John and Nancy are both engaging speakers, and passionate about wine-making – they make the types of wines that they like to drink. Which are blended wines more in the French style. They also grow their grapes organically.

The first wine we sample was the Lasseter Family Rose – we had tried this last year at a winemaker dinner and really liked it, but it was sold out. I saw that they had it in the wine store yesterday so I bought a couple of bottles. It’s a dry rose, not at all like a white zinfandel, but it’s very crisp and refreshing – a great summer day wine.

There were also two red wines – the 2008 Rhone Style Red Blend and the 2006 St. Emilion Style Red Blend. These weren’t really to my taste, but Lee enjoyed them.

They are in the process of building a new state-of-the art winery, which will open this fall, allowing them to expand their production. Eventually the winery will be solar powered.

We had an opportunity to speak briefly with Julia Iantosca afterwards and asked her if she had seen World of Color the night before – she had, and loved it – said they wanted them to run it over again after they saw it.

And that’s enough about today for now.