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Great Wine Escape Weekend, Reswirled

As I noted a week ago in print: You gotta give Monterey County Vitners & Growers credit – they aren’t fermenting the same old grape juice.

First they shipped their annual Winemakers Celebration to the Barnyard, helping pioneer its event space, now they’ve bottled Great Wine Escape Weekend into a stomping together of food trucks and wine growers at another rare venue, Del Monte Aviation Center.

Come 1-4pm Saturday, Nov. 12, look for more than 40 wineries and rolling yum from Babaloo Cuban Cuisine, A Piece of Cake Bakery, The Pizza Gypsy, The Treatbot, Me and the Hound Memphis BBQ and Lugano’s Swiss Bistro.

If you need more than the best local food trucks and a massive taste library of local wines to have a good time, you are one needy mo' fo'.

And one more thing about you: You'll love this event, because in addition to flavors from such mobile munchie masters as those listed above and two-score wineries like Heller, Talbott and Chalone, there's the funky fly setting at the airport and tutelage on the environmental elements that make local varietals vibrant (hint: it has something to do with this "Best of the Blue" talk), live Cachagua Playboys music, a Wine Enthusiast Lounge where you can ask West Coast Editor of Wine Enthusiast Steve Heimoff your oenophile inquiries, cooking demos, silent auctions and all the perks of hanging with scores of the county's most gifted wine movers and swirlers (hint #2: wine people aren't short on personality).

The complete list of wineries taking flight:

Bernardus Winery • Boekenoogen Vineyards and Winery • Cambiata • Caraccioli Cellars • Carmel Road • Chalone • Chateau Julien Wine Estate • Coastview Vineyards • De Tierra Vineyards • DFV • Estancia • Figge Cellars • Galante • Hahn Winery • Heller Estate Organic Vineyards • Holman Ranch • J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines • Joyce Vineyards • Le Mistral • Manzoni Vineyards • Marin’s Vineyard • McIntyre Vineyards • Mercy Vineyards • Mesa Del Sol Vineyards • Michaud Vineyards • Morgan Winery • Otter Cove Wines • Paraiso Vineyards • Pelerin Wines • Pessagno Winery • Pianetta Winery • Pierce Ranch • Saint’s Valley Scheid Vineyards • Sycamore Cellars • Talbott Vineyards • Testarossa • Tondre Tudor Wines • Ventana Vineyards • Wente Vineyards • Wrath Wines

It's $60 ($95 VIP preview 11:30am-12:45pm). Jump on www.montereywines.org. for tickets.

And there's actually another Great Wine Escape 2.0 event happening the evening before. As MCVG shifts from a scattered diaspora of tastings and dinners to a focused wine dinner Nov. 11 and the grand tasting at the airport—and it seems they packed the power of the roughly 20 wine dinners they did previously into this one-off at 1833.

Six different wineries—including Coastview, Caraccioli Cellars, Scheid Vineyards, Bernardus and Pelerin pair with Levi Mezick's superior tastes like the must-have hamachi with pickled jalapeño (seriously, it's my favorite app of autumn so far), butternut squash ravioli and pan-roasted squab with black lentils, porcinis and truffle sauce.

It happens 6:15-11pm at Restaurant 1833, 500 Hartnell St., Monterey for $150 inclusive. Same website as above or 375-9400 for tickets.