Us wine lovers in San Francisco are some of the luckiest people in the world. Not only do we live in a city that provides access to fantastic food and wine, we’re an hour from wine country and world-class wines. Of course, that hour-long drive is still too much for some people. You know who you are. You have the best intentions — really, you’re always meaning to head up to Napa to do a little tasting, or to spend an afternoon in Healdsburg at their local wine tasting bar, but somehow you never quite get around to it.

For those wine lovers who haven’t quite motivated for the trip, or for those who can’t be bothered, the San Francisco Bay Area still delivers. Or perhaps more accurately the East Bay. Called by some the newest “wine country” in America, the cities of Alameda, Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville play host to many small (and a few larger) wineries of unusually high quality. Some are so small that you’d never get there (or know about them) unless you were invited to. But for the first time, they’ve all teamed up together to have a wine tasting. Think of it as an instant trip to the wine country without the traffic. OK, we’re missing the scenery, too, but what do you want from a wine tasting event that gives you access to a bunch of small winemakers within ten or fifteen minutes of your front door?

Next Saturday, August 26th, you can join the following wineries at Rosenblum Cellars in Alameda for a tasting of what the East Bay has to offer:

Blacksmith Cellars
Broc Cellars
Dashe Cellars
A Donkey and Goat
Edmunds St. John
Eno Wines
Harrington Wines
JC Cellars
Lost Canyon Winery
Periscope Cellars
Rosenblum Cellars
Tayerle Wines

If you have a couple of hours to kill, I highly recommend checking it out. Some of these producers are fantastic.

East Bay Urban Vintners Tasting
Saturday, August 26th 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Rosenblum Cellars
2900 Main St.
Alameda, CA 94501 (map)

Tickets are $25 available at the door only. For more information on the wineries, see the East Bay Vintners web site.