Croatian president visits Grgich

At the tender age of 23, Colbert Coldwell looked around and saw both devastation and promise. The year was 1906 and the place was San Francisco. It was 18 weeks after the "Great Earthquake." Coldwell, with only two years of real estate experience, took on a lawyer and a bookkeeper as partners and opened a real estate office amid the debris of the earthquake. In 1913, the two partners left and Benjamin Banker came on board.

PARIS -- France's government said Wednesday it will soon allow vintners to flavor their wine with wood shavings -- a moneysaving shortcut to help face off tough international competition, and a reform that immediately angered purists.

BERKELEY -- California wine sales in the United States hit another record in 2005, a rise experts attribute to a jelling of factors from the Supreme Court weighing in on wine shipments to the vino-centric movie, "Sideways."

Napa Valley has its Winecrusher statue to remind visitors they're entering wine country. Now Prosser, Wash., in the heart of Yakima Valley, is thinking about building a 100-foot high water tower in the shape of a wine glass.

Weekly wine columnists for newspapers often fall into a habitual pattern: Facing a deadline, they taste a handful of recent-release wines, write a brief introduction about the class of wine they fall into, and plop down, at the end of the column, a few "tasting notes" on the best wines they tasted.