The dynamic and wide-ranging array of speakers and session hosts continues to build at the Robert Mondavi Winery’s Taste3 conference, scheduled for July 17-19 at Copia in Napa. For three days, the Taste3 conference will bring more than 300 guests together for one of the most unique and compelling gatherings of the year.

Bruce Cohn, proprietor of B.R. Cohn Winery and longtime manager of the Doobie Brothers, was honored by the National Veterans Foundation at a benefit screening of Edward Nachtrieb’s documentary “All the Way Home” in Los Angeles. In the past 21 years, Cohn’s B.R. Cohn Winery  Fall Charity Festival and the Doobie Brothers have raised more than $2 million dollars for the National Veterans Foundation.

It was a meal fit for a king. The wine alone cost a king’s ransom, while the price of admission most assuredly was a princely sum.

Lunch on that particular Friday was served only after a walk past rows of well-tended cabernet sauvignon vines in the historic Lewelling Vineyard on the west side of St. Helena.

A design for a high-tech closure for wine bottles that would allow the wine to breathe much like traditional bark corks won the $15,000 first prize in the annual Big Bang! Business Plan Competition at  UC, Davis. The contest is run by students in the Graduate School of Management.

Margaret Duckhorn has been elected Wine Institute board chairman for the 2008-2009 fiscal year. She is co-founder and executive vice president of industry relations at Duckhorn Wine Company, which includes Duckhorn Vineyards, Paraduxx, and Goldeneye.

Most of the wine names we see regularly on store shelves and wine lists are well known to the vast majority of Americans.