4/21 Allergy Relief, Family Make-Over, California Wines, Paul Reiser Show, Pride Mountain Vineyards

What's Cookin' Today Hour ONE:

Pharmacist and WebMD Contributor Maria Mantione Provides Tips for Relief this Allergy Season

Over 40 million Americans suffer from indoor and outdoor allergies. Allergy symptoms can really interfere in a person’s daily life. In fact, there are more than 2 million lost school days and 4 million missed or lost workdays each year are due to seasonal allergies. However, with proper management and patient education allergy symptoms can be relieved.

With spring now upon us, it’s more important than ever that Americans are aware of how to limit allergens inside and outside the home, and learn about the latest treatments available to help relieve allergy symptoms.

An active member of the American Pharmacists Association, Maria Mantione, PharmD, CGP, regularly contributes to an “Ask the Pharmacist” series on WebMD and several national magazines including Women’s Health, AARP The Magazine and Cosmopolitan. She is available for live interviews to provide tips that adults and children who suffer from allergies can follow to alleviate symptoms this spring.

Maria Mantione, PharmD, CGP has been a Certified Geriatric Pharmacist since 2000 and is currently an Associate Clinical Professor of Community Pharmacy Practice at St. John’s University College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions. She also serves as the Wellness Coordinator for King Kullen Pharmacy, where she provides specialized pharmacy services including comprehensive pharmaceutical care. She focuses much of her practice on self-care, and has presented on self-care topics on a local and national level. Dr. Mantione is an active member of the American Pharmacists Association, serves as the faculty advisor to the St. John’s Chapter of the Academy of Student Pharmacists, Secretary of the Self-Care/ Nonprescription Medicines Special Interest Group of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

Family Circle Magazine Food Editor Makes Over a Family’s Eating and Exercise Habits and Tells Us How to Do It, Too!

Food Editor of Family Circle, Regina Ragone, has taken on her toughest and most-extensive assignment yet. She’s embarked on a year-long endeavor called, “Healthy Family 2011,” wherein she committed to work with one family to make-over their poor eating and physical activity habits.

Now, three months in, Ragone is reporting on what’s working and how we can incorporate some of these successful tactics in our own homes.

Regina Ragone, R.D., Food Director for Family Circle, brings more than twenty years of nutrition expertise to the magazine. Regina has extensive top tier national media experience including The TODAY Show and Good Morning America Health. Regina has dedicated her career to educating people on the many benefits of eating healthy foods, and is the author of Win the Fat War cookbook and Decadent Diabetic Desserts and co-author of Meals that Heal. Regina also served as the test kitchen director for Ladies Home Journal, food editor for both Weight Watchers magazine and the Weight Watchers Publishing Group and as a nutritionist for Family Circle magazine.

For more info, go to www.familycircle.com!

What's Cookin' Today Hour TWO:

Joel Fisher Tells Us About His On The Road Tour of California Wines!

California would be the fourth largest producer of wine in the world if it were an independent nation. California also ranks first in wine consumption in the U.S., followed by Florida, then New York. There are currently 2,843 registered wineries and 4,600 winegrape growers in California according to the California Wine Institute.California wine has gained world recognition for many fine wines due to the wealth and variety of soil conditions and micro climates that exist here.

There are 107 American Viticulture Areas (AVAs) in California. Each is a distinct winegrape growing area recognized by the U.S. government, a testament to the variety of microclimates in the state. California has 107 of the 188 AVAs established in the U.S. There are more than 60,000 registered California wine labels. Ninety percent of all U.S. wine exports are from California.

According to the Wine Institute, a San Francisco-based trade group for California producers, nearly 42 percent of U.S. wine exports are shipped to the European Union. The next top markets were: Canada, Japan, Hong Kong and China.

We're Taking an Inside Look at NBC's The Paul Reiser Show with Executive Producer, Jonathan Shapiro!

Jonathan Shapiro is a multi-talented writer-producer who was born and raised in Los Angeles and whose talents extend into law and government.

Among his television credits are serving as an executive producer on “Justice” and “Just Legal,” as a supervising producer on “Boston Legal” and “The Practice” and as co-executive producer on “Life.” Additionally, he wrote multiple episodes for each of these series.

Previously, Shapiro was chief of staff to Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante and counsel for the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers. He also has served as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division in Washington, D.C. and the Central District of California.

Shapiro was appointed by California Chief Justice Ronald George to serve a two-year term on the Commission for Impartial Courts, Task Force on Public Information and Education. In 2010, the California State Senate appointed him to a four-year term as a member of the California Little Hoover Commission Government Oversight. He also continues to teach as an adjunct professor at USC Gould School of Law.

Shapiro is married to comedy writer Betsy Borns, and they have 3 children.

About the Paul Reiser Show: The show stars Reiser as…Paul Reiser. It's been a few years since Paul's hit TV series went off the air. Since then, he's been enjoying the quiet life at home with his lovely wife, Claire (Amy Landecker, “A Serious Man”), and kids and generally minding his own business, writing and producing television but enjoying life out of the spotlight. Lately, however, Paul has been thinking that it's time he did something new, something meaningful. But what that next thing might be, he has no idea.

In his quest to figure it out, Paul is both helped and hindered by his new "friends." Like most men his age, Paul didn't choose them. They're the husbands of his wife's friends, the dads of his kids’ schoolmates. Thrown together by circumstance, Paul and his cohorts, including Jonathan (Ben Shenkman, “Angels in America”), Habib (Omid Djalili,“The Infidel”), Fernando (Duane Martin, “All of Us”) and Brad (Andrew Daly, “MADtv”) form an unlikely comradeship -- and a horrible basketball team.

“The Paul Reiser Show" is a production of Bonanza Productions Inc., in association with Nuance Productions and Warner Bros. Television. Reiser and Shapiro co-wrote the pilot as well as each of the episodes that follow and both serve as executive producers. Bryan Gordon (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) directed the pilot. For "The Paul Reiser Show" embeddable clips and full episodes, visit NBC.com's official show site: http://www.nbc.com/the-paul-reiser-show/

We're Visiting Pride Mountain Vineyards with CEO and Owner, Steven Pride

Pride Mountain Vineyards is a 235-acre estate with a wooden-beamed, modest-sized winery that blends smoothly into its mountainous surroundings and California heritage. The charming and unpretentious tasting room offers guests the opportunity to sample the latest vintages while chatting with the gracious and knowledgeable staff.

With no telephone until the 1920’s, no electricity until the 1940’s, and no paved road into St. Helena until the 1950’s, the history of winemaking on top of Spring Mountain has been one of hard work and dedication.Summit Ranch, as it has long been known to the locals, was deeded by the U.S. government to its first owners in 1872.

Thirty-five title changes later, the property is now home to Pride Mountain Vineyards. Only deer, fox, coyotes, rattlesnakes, bears, and mountain lions have been continual residents.Summit Ranch has a history rich in the texture of 19th Century winemaking. The first records of vineyard plantings date back to 1869. Although these records do not reveal which varietals were cultivated, a square sixty-four foot by sixty-four foot, three-story stone winery (as seen in the photo above) suggests plantings of considerable acreage. Built in 1890, the gravity-fed structure served the entire mountain.

Sometime during prohibition (1920 to 1933), the old winery was destroyed by fire. Local lore has it that the fire was more than just a little suspicious. All that is left today are the original stone walls.Further research turned up literature and photographs from the era depicting the ranch as the site of many neighborhood gatherings. Each Sunday, families would come to picnic, tell stories, and play cards in the large shaded area adjacent to the winery. Finding that this beautiful spot had become the ranch dump when they purchased the property, the Pride family restored "The Grove" and the park-like area is now often used for picnics, special winery functions and mountain gatherings.

Riding the crest of the Mayacamas Mountain Range at an elevation of 2,100 feet, the 235 acre property which is now home to Pride Mountain Vineyards is bisected by the Napa/Sonoma county line. While in 1890 one winery served the entire mountain community, in 1990 government regulations required that Pride Mountain Vineyards have two separate facilities, one in Napa County and one in Sonoma County, with the division down the center of the crush pad. Wines produced here now are designated Napa Valley, Sonoma County or with percentages of both, supporting the tag line, "One Ranch ~ Two Counties."

Even in the early years, the county line was seen as a way to increase county revenue. A little one room school house immediately adjacent to the ranch, known as the “Diamond Mountain School”, was built on skids so that it could be moved from one county to the other depending on which county had more tax paying families with children in school!New plantings and redevelopment did not take place until the 1950s, and the property has been in continual grape production ever since then. A modern winery was not restored to the property until the Prides constructed their present facility which has been fully operational since 1997.

For more info, go to http://www.pridewines.com!

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