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Last month I got as close to heaven as any oenophile has ever been. I’m not much of a camper, but when Matt Levy, public relations and marketing manager, invited me to attend Camp Schramsberg, a three-day sparkling wine seminar at Schramsberg Vineyards in Calistoga, I jumped at the chance. Schramsberg Vineyards has been producing sparkling wine since 1965 when they became the first U.S. producer to use Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes in the méthode champenoise (where a secondary fermentation occurs while the wine is in the bottle - thus producing bubbles). These sparkling wines are so good that in 1972, the Blanc de Blancs was served at the historic “Toast to Peace” in Beijing, between President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai. To this day, Schramsberg’s wines are still being served in the White House.

Dear readers, I present to you, Mr. Charles Dickens, a man of his time, the time of the Victorians - and also a man of our own modern time. Allow me to have the portentousness to suggest that Mr. Dickens, that titan of Victorian literature, if he were alive today, would find in our age a blend of social commentary and larger-than-life characters to fill a hundred great novels.

One of my pet peeves is how people often call forth the condemnation of the Founding Fathers upon modern-day America, as if the men who founded our nation were demigods, filled with a divine moral soundness and evangelical wisdom formed by the deeply puritanical society of colonial times. The leaders who shaped our nation’s path would shrink in shock at our modern political idolatry. They would insist we take them out of the temple of worship and instead see them as human beings, as people with flaws and prejudices shaped by the culture of their time.

Every woman is at risk for breast cancer.

Emily Mae came to us on a golden day in April 2009. Born 22 months after her sister Gracie, Emily was a bouncing baby girl weighing a hair more than 9 pounds.

My dad was a mechanic when I was growing up. He worked by