What’s more fun than fighting the crowds in Las Vegas? Drinking some of the best wines in the world while you’re fighting the crowds. For years I saw the ads for the Wine Spectator Grand Tour event in New York and thought how cool it would be to go to one. Finally they deigned to hold the event in the West, so how could we resist?

Pairing wine and food shouldn’t be too difficult for a wine shop, right? Sometimes it’s as easy as just matching a country’s cuisine with that country’s native wines or trying to find complementary flavors in the food and wine. But usually you know what the food is. Recently the Blue Heron Inn hosted its third food & wine dinner. The past two had featured superb Italian cuisine from Chef Dan Davis of the South Fork Lodge and outstanding French cuisine from Chef Jason Steinke of the Cellar. Wine choices were fairly easy. But this time Blue Heron owner Claudia Klingler decided to make things tougher. She polled the 16 people who were signed up for the dinner/cooking demonstration/overnight stay and asked what their favorite cuisine was, then asked Chef Steinke to come up with a course from each choice. Okay, who else besides me has no idea what Japanese Gyoza and Vietnamese Banh Xeo are? My research didn’t help much, since the only beverage mentioned with some of the dishes was beer. But I decided that if the wines were good enough and plentiful enough (and I knew the food would be good), that all would be well.