Wine, Dollars Flow at Grove Theatre Company Benefit

Bacchus would have been proud.

Under azure skies and the shade of a stately olive tree, supporters of the Grove Theatre Company gathered in Garden Grove’s Mills House Courtyard for the theater’s annual Wine Tasting Festival.

For connoisseurs and tyros alike, Sunday’s event in Village Green Park was an afternoon of sampling and savoring--and lining up for refills.

“I’ve found my favorite!” cried an ebullient Thomas Bradac, the theater’s production artistic director, as he hoisted a glass of Robert Pepi Chardonnay.

Bradac had spent the day setting up for the party, while not a hundred yards away, in the Gem Theatre (home of the Grove Theatre Company), his company rehearsed Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” opening later this month.

“I used to be a Scotch and water man,” said Garden Grove Mayor Jonathan Cannon, whose wife, Linda, was in charge of the benefit. Savoring the bouquet of a 1980 Louis Martini Cabernet Sauvignon, the mayor smiled. “This is food. “

Three hundred guests paid $15 each for a shot at more that two-dozen kinds of California wine, as well as a full complement of palate cleansers: fruit, bread, gouda and pepper jack and asiago cheeses, Chinese dim sum hors d’oeuvres and a diet-killer dessert selection highlighted by Bailey’s Irish Cream mousse cake.

An estimated $5,000 was raised by the event, which included sales from a silent auction of items ranging from a Minolta camera to a round of wine tasting at the Ritz-Carlton.

Board member Richard Bye, who with his wife, Roseanne, and three other couples makes frequent pilgrimages to vineyards throughout the state, sipped Tour Eiffel champagne mixed with blackberry cordial--the creation of Bohemian Distributing.

Surveying the jovial crowd, Bye observed: “All that talk about a wine’s body and legs and this and that--don’t pay any attention. Those terms don’t mean anything. People who know about wine, just do that to scare everybody else away.”

After sampling “one of the white wines, I couldn’t say exactly which one,” Robert Dunek, president of the theater board, switched to 7-Up, noting that it was “a very good month.”

Linda Cannon, in a black and red dropped-waist silk dress, plucked a pork dumpling from a tray and said, laughing: “This is perfect for my husband and I. We’re new W.I.N.O.s!” The mayor clarified: “We just joined a group called ‘Wine Investigation for Neophytes and Oenophiles.”

When is a warehouse not a warehouse? When the tenants bring in croupiers and throw a party.

So it went at Saturday’s Monte Carlo Casino Night benefit for the Food Distribution Center in the City of Orange.

Amid the center’s floor-to-ceiling boxes of cereal, marshmallows, day-old bread and assorted canned goods, 200 casually dressed guests munched shrimp, chicken nuggets, fresh strawberries and crudites--and got to the business of gambling tout de suite.

“Only the brave and the daring (gamble)--or is that only the crazy?” asked Dolores Moore, as she moved up to a blackjack table with fiance Eugene Brock, who works on the warehouse staff.

Play money and poker chips aside, the real winners on Saturday night were the hungry of Orange County.

Since it was established in 1983 by the St. Vincent De Paul Society, the center has distributed more than 20 million pounds of food to 200 nonprofit social service agencies in Orange County, director Dan Harney said.

“We’ve got lots of harbors and lots of boats in those harbors, and beautiful plazas in this county,” Harney said. “And we’ve also got 320 people at risk of going to bed hungry sometime during the month.”

Each year, the center has increased distribution--from 2.7 million pounds of food in 1983 to an estimated 9 million pounds this year. And each year, the center has added warehouse space.

Proceeds from Saturday’s $50-per-person benefit--an estimated $8,000--will help fund an additional 70,000 cubic feet of refrigeration and freezer space now under construction.

“Most of the regulars (who work in the warehouse) are big-hearted slobs,” warehouse worker Brock said. “We get the job done, and then we volunteer our time on the side. Last Saturday, we went out and picked 1,200 pounds of avocados. The other week, we brought in 1,390 pounds of oranges. We did that on our own time, because I think everyone who works here has a real feeling for what we’re doing. We want to do our part, whatever we can.”

After leading a tour through the basement construction area, center board Chairman Thomas A. Fuentes called the food bank “the most gratifying and fulfilling charitable project I have ever been involved with. If a person is hungry, that is the first human need you have to take care of; you have to start there, and then you can go to work on the rest--medical attention, shelter, whatever else is needed.

“This is a community of such tremendous affluence,” Fuentes continued. “If we can bring together the resources to build the (Orange County) Performing Arts Center (in Costa Mesa), which is a facility to essentially entertain ourselves, then we damn well ought to be able to feed our poor.”