With a smorgasbord of odd and interesting combinations of foods that rarely appear on a table together at other times during the year, there is absolutely no way you are going to find one wine that fits all.

Fortunately for our local wineries, many members of the popular press have latched onto Zinfandel as “The” Thanksgiving wine. You won’t get any arguments from me. In fact, please tell your friends that we are the Thanksgiving wine capital of the world.

As your “wine guy” I’ll offer this advice: get out the shotgun.

This year why not take a scattershot approach with three or more bottles of your favorite Lodi wines?

You’ll want a white to make the white guys happy. You’ll also want a red, plus, perhaps, something a bit sweet (even a White Zin) for those who don’t care.

Gather your bounty of bottles together, pop the corks (or screwcaps or boxes), put them all in the center of the table, and let your family and friends just have fun discovering for themselves what goes best with the green beans, dark meat and cranberry sauce!

(By the way, Jon Bonné wrote a very entertaining story on this topic recently in the S.F. Chronicle. It is definitely worth a read by clicking here.)

This weekend, I discovered a “new” winery, named after owners VIC and CARrie Mettler along with vine-dog/jogging-buddy MONTy, who together create Vicarmont.

“New” isn’t exactly correct, since they’ve been making wine under the guidance of winemaker Heather Pyle from “backyard” vines, hidden behind their cherry orchard, since 2005. A tasting room was opened in April of this year.

The standout wine for me was the estate-grown 2006 Merlot, priced at $16 a bottle, but currently on a timely blow-out sale of 40% off with a 6-bottle purchase.

The award-winning 2006, with the old vMv label of Monty chomping on a mouthful of grapes, had the perfect amount of wonderful classic Merlot bell pepper and dusty tannins, along with naturally sweet fruit to please most Merlot drinkers. At 14.2% alcohol, it won’t send you under the Thanksgiving table.

On the other hand, the riper 2007 Merlot came in at 15.5% alcohol, with signature Lodi jammy fruit replacing the bell pepper.

I recommend that you drive on out to Vicarmont, located south of East Victor Road at 16475 North Locust Tree Road, and discover what style of Merlot best suits your pallet in your own head-to-head competition.

Here is a feel for the Vicarmont tasting room through images by Richard Hockett/SunRidge Photo for the book, Lodi on the Label - a very exciting project that should be available next year:

Somehow they’ve made it into my home, though I’m not sure where they are multiplying and dividing on the property. Perhaps they have maggotized the few bunches of Petite Sirah I’ve left hanging for the spiders and birds.

Besides middle-of-the-night mechanical harvesting, this is one of the few annoyances of our local industry. Those piles of pressed grapes being dumped back into our city-surrounding moat of vineyards is the perfect breeding ground for the brewing swarm.

It really is amazing how fast they can home in on even a few drops of wine. While topping up our barrels today, each white rubber bung went from 0 to 60 flies in minutes. And I was being careful not to leave any drips.

Until our first good frost, you can make a flytrap with left-over wine in a bottle. Just add a little diluted dishwashing soap to the wine to break the surface tension and they’ll go under for good.

Similar to our childhood experiment of making a chicken’s wishbone “rubberized” by soaking it in vinegar, researchers have found that teeth soaked in white wine lose their calcium, causing premature loss of enamel. Being generally more acidic, whites could potentially do this more than reds.

Research presented at a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine shows that if you are a woman using in-vitro fertilization to become pregnant, the odds of being successful drop by about a quarter if you are drinking white wine.

In general, research suggests keeping off just about all alcohol once a woman does get pregnant.

Rush University Medical Center published research showing a link between alcohol and aggressive cancer cells. Exposing benign colon and breast cancer cells to alcohol triggered a change to make them more likely to metastasize, showing rapid growth and becoming less anchored to neighboring cells.

This is further evidence that if you have a history of breast cancer, in particular, in your family, you should limit your consumption of alcohol.

As we enter the final stretch of Lodi’s 2009 crush, instead of wooden-slatted basket presses, most wineries are using air-inflated, stainless steel bladder presses that purr like a fine sports car. And the latest fad is an all-steel, hydraulic version of the old basket press.

Each winemaker has a personal preference for how to press – or not to press – each variety of grape he or she works with.

One winemaker I know wants all the “guts” he can get out of Lodi Cabernet Sauvignon, requesting us to press as hard as possible. He wanted more tannins to make the wine age longer and give it a more interesting feel in the mouth.

Other winemakers want to use only what drains out of a tank as “free run,” not bothering to press.

Some will keep portions (“fractions”) of wine separate as the press pushes harder. They blend them back into the main batch if the wine needs them – or if the winery needs to bottle as much wine as possible!

In Lodi wineries, white wines have mostly finished the first round of cold-fermentation of sugars by yeast, and bacteria is now making wines bubble as acids are softened.

Reds, fermented at warmer temperatures, are about in the same stage of development.

What you get when trying a fermenting wine is a strong appreciation for the entire winemaking process, particularly the effect of oak barrels and aging. The wine goes from disjointed and “grapey” to balanced and “respectable” over the next several months.

That’s what makes this weekend’s 3rd Annual First Sip, being held at over 40 Lodi wineries, so much fun.

Tickets good for Saturday and Sunday are $45 at the door of any participating winery, but if you purchase them before Friday night at www.firstsiplodi.com, you’ll save $10 per ticket. Better yet, if you are a wine club member, call the winery and see if you can get tickets for $25 each.

By the way, those kind designated drivers get to listen to live music, take tours, and munch the appetizers and small plates most wineries will be offering for free.

I’ll admit I’ve been most happily duped all these years.

With the presses no longer rolling on the old, reliable Gourmet Magazine, the publisher has released the archived articles for the world to see on line, such as, “Shattered Myths: Expensive crystal? Coffee mug? Jelly jar? Does it really matter what you drink your wine from?”

Daniel Zwerdling’s August 2004 article knocked me off my high horse.

Apparently the scientific community no longer endorses the idea of mapping tastes to specific areas of the tongue, which thereby destroys most of the logic of how a glass of a certain shape can direct wine to where it will be best enjoyed in the mouth.

However, the scientists that have debunked the effectiveness of Riedel in making wine taste better are also willing to defend the heightened experience based on the placebo effect.

As with so many things in life, if you believe the wine tastes better, then, to you, it will actually taste better.

No matter what, if I’m served the same wine in a Styrofoam cup and in a nice glass, I’ll think it tastes better in the glass any day.

In yet another very interesting podcast, Napa Valley Wine Radio’s Nancy Hawks Miller interviewed Diane De Filipi, owner of “Let’s Go Cook Italian”, about wine and food of the Renaissance.

The wine of the 1400’s seems to have been universally bad enough that it was a common practice to add cinnamon and honey to provide some flavor.

While the grapes may have been potentially very good, faulty long-term storage made wines worse rather than better.

Since the wine couldn’t age, the smoothest, least tannic new wine that first flowed out of the fermentation vats (“free run”) was what our wealthiest ancestors drank.

The poor drank the left-over wine that was pressed from the fermented skins, while the poorest soaked those skins in water to get a tiny bit of alcohol.

Sulfur additions were just starting to be allowed in Germany to protect the wine from bad microorganisms. And the first “Ports” were being made by adding extra alcohol simply to kill off more bad bacteria and yeast so the wine could be exported.

Quality improved tremendously once wine was stored in early versions of the glass bottles we now take for granted.

Dyed-in-the-wool Lodi wine fans are familiar with the word “Carignane,” but most of you probably gave up on trying to read it correctly.

Carignane, correctly pronounced “kahr-ing-YAWN,” but affectionately called “kerrigan” by locals, was once the third most planted wine grape in California.

The grape produces a floral wine with good food-friendly acidity, especially in our warm growing region. If you look at the gold medal count, you’ll see Carignane from such producers as Jessie’s Grove and Van Ruiten among the winners, with wines produced from vines up to 120 years old.

So it’s hard to see what was a beautiful 32 acres of gnarly-old Carignane planted just after World War II now completely gone.

Southern France, where Carignane once occupied over half a million acres, can’t seem to yank out the old vines fast enough, having already replaced ¾ of them with Merlot and Syrah.

Hard to argue with dollars, of course. Old vine Carignane is selling now mostly to small producers only wanting a ton or two each – sadly more of a hassle than it’s worth.

So save Carignane! Buy a bottle!

Bet you didn’t know that yeasts have a tendency to kill themselves in their own excrement. They’re such voracious consumers of sugar that they ignore how fast they expel ethyl alcohol, carbon dioxide and heat.

Yeasts can cook themselves to death, especially in a large tank, because the act of fermenting sugar gives off a wasteful smidgen of heat. While you wouldn’t be able to feel anything remotely warm from one yeast doing its work, put billions of them together and you’ve got a mini power plant.

They start dying off over 130 degrees, which is why those dimpled stainless-steel cooling jackets or internal coils are crucial to keeping large batches of micro-winemakers happy. We commonly set the thermostats to an optimal 85 degrees.

Most yeasts struggle to work once they are swimming in 14% alcohol or more. At 15%, all but the specially-bred über-yeasts are ready to explode.

And you don’t want them unhappy, because disgruntled individuals cut loose with nasty aromas and flavors that can sabotage a season’s worth of work in the vineyard.