Experience autumn in Sonoma County, using all five senses, at the 4th annual Artisano celebration, Saturday, November 17, from noon to 4p.m. at Vintner’s Inn in Santa rosa (4350 Barnes Road, Santa Rosa).

Discover local artisan ultra-premium wines, delicacies from the finest restaurants that source regional seasonal ingredients, and meet many of the region’s most talented artists. Hosted by Vintners Inn in the heart of Wine Country, Artisano will feature a raffle and silent auction of Sonoma County’s most creative lots with proceeds benefitting Ceres Community Project.

Tickets for the Grand Tasting: $75, http://arestravel.com/4042_attraction-tickets_a843_r434007.html

Ancient Oak Cellars announces the Grand Opening of their new Tasting Room – located in the landmark Corrick’s building. You are invited to a weekend-long celebration of art & wine with live music, raffle drawings, and special 2-for-1 tastings of awarding-winning estate Siebert Ranch Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel. 637 Fourth St., Santa Rosa.

Saturday, Oct. 27, 11a.m. to 5p.m.

Wednesday, Oct. 24, 7p.m.

Blue Bottle founder James Freeman guides readers through coffee roasting at home using standard kitchen tools, brewing the perfect cup of coffee, and making espresso-based drinks like a pro. Combined with chef Caitlin Freeman’s recipes for coffee-inspired treats, this rich package will appeal to coffee aficionados everywhere. Free, Copperfield’s Books, Healdsburg, 104 Matheson St., Healdsburg.

Author Scott Hutchins discusses his new book, “A Working Theory of Love” on Monday, November 12 at 6pm at Bistro 29 in Santa Rosa.

Copperfield’s Books has worked with the chef to specially create a three-course dinner with complimentary glass of wine or beverage are included in the price of the $75 ticket.

Set in San Francisco, the novel is about love, sex, artificial intelligence, grief and how the shallows of our lives can be just as treacherous as its depths. (Read the review)

Order tickets and more details online.

Will local chef Duskie Estes win a spot on this year’s Next Iron Chef competition? Estes, who co-owns Zazu Restaurant & Farm in Santa Rosa, is among four competitors vying for a single available spot on this season’s “Road to Redemption.”

The 2012 Food Network series focuses on 10 chefs who’ve failed to make the cut in the past. Nine of the spots have already been secured by chefs including Nate Appleman, Elizabeth Falkner, Alex Guarnaschelli and Marcel Vigneron.

Estes lost her bid for title two years ago in Season 3: Episode four. It wasn’t pretty.

Over the last several weeks, Estes and three other competitors have taken part in Webisodes on foodnetwork.com for the coveted opening.

Today, the site aired Estes’s episode (which is only about 6 minutes long.)

I won’t spoil the fun, but suffice to say, there’s a Sonoma County duck involved, some awkward moments with her old nemesis Alton Brown and a lot lotta smack talk.

Watch it here. http://www.foodnetwork.com/the-next-iron-chef-web-series/package/index.html

Let me start by reminding you that the SRJC’s Culinary Cafe — in fact the whole program — moved last winter to their new, and very fancy digs on Mendocino Avenue (across from the JC). I say that because one of my lunch companions showed up to the old location when I invited her to lunch, though in her defense the Yelp page still lists their B St. location.

But once you walk into the new space, any preconceptions you may have had about the cafe melt away. The new space is bright, airy, warm and modern with the professional feel of a real restaurant rather than a run-down cafeteria. You can still watch the students bustling about the open kitchen, but video monitors also track their actions for easier viewing.

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The menu, however,  is much-expanded to include casual sandwiches (grilled skirt steak or eggplant parmigiana, $7.50-$8), wood-fired pizza (barbecue chicken, margarita or chanterelle mushroom, $7.50) and light salads along with heartier entrees (pork with polenta, duck breast with twice-baked potato, oyster stew, $8.50 to about $12). Tapping heavily into the school’s Shone Farm for raw ingredients gives student chefs a head start when it comes to flavor and freshness, so some of the best dishes are the simplest. These students are, after all, learning to cook in Sonoma County so ingredients come first.

Keep in mind that this is a culinary training ground, so there will be some hits and misses, though the reasonable prices make it less daunting to take a chance. The school serves lunch from 11:30a.m. to 2p.m. Wednesday through Friday weekly and reservations are highly recommended, since the dining room is relatively intimate. Just want some breakfast nibbles? Skip Starbucks and grab a decadent, freshly-made pastry Wed-Fri from 7:30a.m. to 2p.m.

Closed October 17-19 and November 21-23.

B. Robert Burdo Culinary Arts Center, 1670 Mendocino Ave, Santa Rosa, 522-2796 for reservations.

Getting the barista stink eye for putting cream and Splenda in his $27-a-pound hand-picked, fair-trade, organic, artisanally-crafted, locally-roasted pour-over can send a girl screaming back to Starbucks. While understandably horrifying to specialty coffee purists, sometimes the rest of us just want a good cup of coffee. With cream and Splenda.

The owners of Santa Rosa’s Bella Rosa Coffee Company agree. Feel free to drink their coffee however you want.

“We’re not coffee fascists,” said co-owner David Greenfield. Inside their compact warehouse/roastery near the county airport, Greenfield and partners Jon Bixler and Cynthia Buck brew sample cups of their Morning Star, French Roast, Roaster’s Reserve and decaffeinated blends. Served with a small carton of half-and-half. Despite the fact that its roasting both inside the warehouse and out on the warm fall afternoon, the coffee’s bright, clean flavor is refreshing and bold, even without cream. It lacks the bitter quality that some may call “character”, but the Bella Rosa crew simply call “burnt”.

Hawking their air-roasted beans around Sonoma County at farm markets and in local grocers, the trio are winning over coffee drinkers with their approachable, low-acid coffees. In the nine months since starting their roastery, they’ve picked up restaurant accounts including the Viola Pastry Boutique and Cafe, Stark Reality Group (Monti’s, Stark’s, both Willi’s), the Santa Rosa Junior College Culinary Cafe, Omelette Express, Jackson’s Bar & Oven and most recently, Three Squares Cafe.

“At restaurants, your first and last impressions are the coffee,” said Bixler. “I want people to put their two hands around a mug and say, ‘Ahhhhhhh, coffee’,” he adds. “Not, ‘That tastes like lemon grass and burdock root’.”

While Bixler and Buck handle customers, Greenfield is the company’s secret weapon. Part roaster and mostly mad-scientist (“I’m not that mad anymore,” he quips), the former machinist reigns over a hand-tooled a blinking, whirring set of contraptions hooked to switches, tubes, wires and a touch-screen pad. This is his coffee-making domain.

“Most roasting equipment used is based on 150-year-old machines. Coffee roasting is so full of luddites,” he adds with characteristic frankness. He frequently dives into complicated descriptions of his equipment which — in laymen’s terms — push heated air through the green coffee beans at a temperature lower than traditional roasters. It allows precise control over the darkness of the roast and the flavor, he explains.

“It’s like non-vintage Champagne. The blends can be different but the taste remains pretty much the same,” said Greenfield. He’s currently working on a new roasting technology called “Greenfield Model No. 63” that looks like a large blender hooked to an air-conditioning unit. It will roasts beans even faster and at an even lower temperature, helping to preserve flavor and achieve a dark roast with low-acidity.

Though admirers of many of the Bay Area and West Coast’s artisanal roasters including Flying Goat, Taylor Maid, SF’s Four Barrel, Ritual Roasters, Sightglass and Blue Bottle, the trio have set their own course.

“We just have no preconceived notions about anything,” said Bixler, who uses organic beans from Ethiopia, Mexico, Guatamala — whatever the partners think will make a good cup of coffee.

“It always comes down to what’s in the cup. We roast beans the way people like, them,” said Bixler, who’s 18-month-old son toddles by carrying a cardboard box for the finished coffee. “I guess what we can say is that we don’t have to convince people to like our coffee,” said Bixler.

Want to try some Bella Rosa coffee? You can taste a cup at the Saturday Redwood Empire Farmers Market at Santa Rosa’s Veteran’s Building or purchase their coffees at local grocers including Oliver’s, Community Market, Molsberry’s Market and online at bellarosacoffeecompany.com.

Let’s all raise a toast to, well, the world’s longest toast. On October 7th, 487 people raised their glasses, one by one, in the Guinness World Record-breaking relay wine toast. Known henceforth as “The Napa Valley Wine Wave”, participants at Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena roundly stomped the nearest competitors in Guangzhou, China who’s toast was more of a wine ripple with a mere 321 participants. Sante!