On Thursday night 03/13/08, international womens charity organization
Spark and the
Napa Valley Vintners lit up the
Rotunda and accompanying floors of
San Francisco City Hall and provided quite a night of charity, wine and beats. "
Nightlife Napa Valley," hosted by the
Napa Valley Vintners to benefit
Spark was a huge and sold-out success.
Spark was started in 2004 by Founder and Founding President,
Maya Garcia. Along with fellow co-founders
Nealan Afsari,
Rohini Gupta,
Karen Hennessey,
Fiona Hsu,
Mona Motwani and my long-time friend
Kathleen Kelly, Garcia set out to start empowering and celebrating young women around the world who are trying to change their local communities for the better. Their work covers
four areas of support: Community Building, Education, Advocacy and Grant-Making. In just a
few short years, Spark has had a tremendous number of
global successes, starting with providing desperately needed support to a
burgeoning support group by and for Rwandan genocide widows, to most recently beginning grant support for the local
OASIS for Girls that holistically supports young immigrant and low income girls with no-cost resources and programs that span the arts to job and leadership training in the SOMA district of San Francisco.
I was first initiated into the innovative world of Wine 2.0 when I attended their NRO event at Varnish last November. What I found was an extremely thriving movement of loosely knit and mainly younger wine aficionados, producers and entrepreneurs that were expanding upon the path set down by the original Wine Brats...they also tend to throw a party with a little more enthusiasm than your average wine event!
With those thoughts in mind, I geared up for some serious wine-drinking, networking and, well, partying last Thursday night. I was keenly aware of how the night would unfold and so I decided to BART and cab it to the event, held at the 3rd street warehouse of Crushpad in San Francisco. Crushpad is a custom crush facility, meaning that they provide equipment, bonded space, reagents and even fruit for boutique wineries and amateur winemakers, alike. They are one of the most well-known companies where winemakers can go to make their own wines with as much or as little hands-on participation as they might choose. I've been hearing about them for years and have been rather intrigued by their facilities, so I was quite happy to check out the space when I first arrived, just before the event opened. 