Frugal Traveler: A Taste of Napa, on a Budget

Like a robust zinfandel and delicate oysters, Napa Valley and frugal travel aren't exactly an ideal pairing.

Or so I thought. Despite Napa's reputation as a pricey destination for wine lovers, over two days last month — during peak fall harvest season, no less — I managed to visit seven vineyards, taste about 30 vintages, learn more about wine than I ever imagined (including how to punch down the cap of skins into a vat of crushed grapes) and not starve — or go homeless. I even had an affordable meal at a restaurant (of sorts) run by Thomas Keller, perhaps the most celebrated chef in America. It was not, alas, at the French Laundry, where the tasting menu for one with two modest glasses of wine will run about $325. In fact, that's about as much as I spent on tastings, meals and lodging combined during my two days in California wine country.

The key to a successfully budget-friendly visit to Napa is picking your wineries carefully. You can eliminate many simply by price: many tastings reach $50 or more a person. Try to stick to the $10 and $15 tastings, some of which offer two-for-one deals if you go to napatouristguide.com/napa-on-a-budget, download the Winery Finder app or pick up coupons at the Napa Valley Welcome Center (visitnapavalley.com/welcome_centers.htm).

But don't be too stingy. The tasting at Tres Sabores (tressabores.com) was the most expensive I did: $25 a person. But given what came with it, it ended up a bargain.

That memorable "punch down" took place during a tour and tasting at the winery, a tiny operation owned by 59-year-old Julie Johnson. Ms. Johnson, her hands purple, interrupted our seven-person tour to ask if we wanted to pitch in some labor. Handing us an apparatus that looked like a giant potato masher, we took turns driving the thick cap of grape skins, buzzing yellow jackets hovering above them, into the juice below. Punching down the skins as they rise to the top, I learned, is vital to maceration, the process by which red wine gains its color and tannins. It is not, however, vital that visitors do it — one of the experiences that made Tres Sabores so great.

Among the others: climbing up a ladder and peering down into a steel tank that does a mechanized version of the punch-down, sampling zinfandel grapes right off the vine, visiting the sheep and guinea hens that provide fertilizer for the vineyards and admiring the pomegranate trees that attract the hummingbirds that gobble harmful insects (and provide fruit for Ms. Johnson's pomegranate paella). Of course, we also tasted her wines (but not the paella).

Even if you know nothing about wine — and I know little — you can go a long way simply by choosing small-scale wineries as far into the hills as possible. For a group, Tres Sabores may be too expensive; as a substitute I'd recommend the tiny Nichelini Winery (nicheliniwinery.com), in the same family since 1890. With a coupon, the tasting is $15 for two, and while there's no tour, there are tables for picnic lunches and even a bocce court.

My next piece of advice: Be flexible, especially when offered a specific tip. My first night, I dined at the bar of Il Posto Trattoria (ilpostonapa.com) in the town of Napa, a reasonably priced restaurant more popular with locals than visitors. I ate an elegant $12 bowl of house-pulled spaghetti with beef-pork-veal meatballs and a vibrant tomato sauce. The bartender, Miguel, suggested I head up into the hills to Pride Mountain Vineyards — so I did.

Going to Pride (pridewines.com) is the very opposite of visiting one of the highway-side wineries along the valley's two main roads, the St. Helena Highway and the Silverado Trail. It's so far up a winding mountain road that the Napa-Sonoma county line runs right through its rolling vineyards. (To properly pay their taxes, they have to keep two sets of books, tracking the exact percentage of Napa grapes and Sonoma grapes that go into each blend.)

At our tasting ($15), our guide, Nikki Lamberti, started by having us try a 2012 viognier with a floral nose and notes of honeysuckle and tropical fruit — or so I was told and subsequently found plausible. (I've always found people who talk this way about wine absurd, but I was trying to learn.) Then she whisked us off to watch a worker load bunches of cabernet sauvignon grapes into an astonishingly efficient machine that crushed and destemmed them, and into a maze of caves burrowed into the hillside, where she had us taste a 2012 merlot directly from the barrel. It was quite tannic, unusual for merlot — the result of the thicker skin that grows when you raise grapes at higher elevations. Who knew? (You, perhaps. But I didn't.) Thicker skin can also mean a deeper color. "We get purple teeth very quickly around here," Ms. Lamberti said.

Since I was driving, I did a lot of spitting and dumping (which bothered me far less than I thought) and made sure to eat hearty meals (which bothered me not at all).

The day I went to Pride and Tres Sabores, I picked up lunch at Ad Hoc Addendum (adhocrestaurant.com/addendum), a little shack behind Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc that serves $16.50 box lunches Thursday to Saturday only. I chose the astonishingly juicy buttermilk fried chicken, which came with spongy corn bread, potato salad and coleslaw. Dinner that night was far cheaper: $1.50 beef cheek tacos, the only choice at Tacos Chavez, a decades-old business operating from a truck in the lot of a convenience store at 75 Coombs Street in Napa.

None of this is to say that you should skip the bigger wineries — just choose well. Take the multilayered experience at the Hess Collection Winery (hesscollection.com) — again, up a winding road from the highway. A four-wine tasting is $10 ($5 with the two-for-one coupon). But you also get three stories of Donald Hess's contemporary art collection to roam, and, if you're lucky, get a tour with their senior wine educator, Bob Becker. We were bombarded with wine trivia (only 4 percent of California wine comes from Napa) and got a lesson on how toasted barrels affect the flavors of the wine they hold.

During the tour, something apparently clicked. In the tasting room a few minutes later, I was saying things like "I'm sensing cherry, and a note of cinnamon." The menu disagreed, and the people next to me laughed, but it was progress.

CHEAP SLEEPS

The biggest challenge to a frugal weekend in Napa Valley is lodging. But there are a few low-cost, utilitarian spots (all in the town of Napa) whose cheapest rooms cost $90 to $100 plus tax, including the Wine Valley Lodge (winevalleylodge.com), the Napa Discovery Inn (napadiscoveryinn.com), and the Motel 6.

After deciding my choices were basically equal, I got the price down by using hotwire.com, an "opaque" lodging site that slashes the price but doesn't reveal the hotel you've booked until you pay. I ended up spending $77 a night ($92 with taxes and fees) for the Napa Discovery, a decent, clean motel, with a very basic free breakfast of cereal, bananas, coffee and orange juice. (I also found a small handful of Airbnb.com rentals — rooms, not entire houses — for under $100 a night.)

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Bites: Restaurant Report: Proprietors Bar & Table in Nantucket, Mass.

Brisie Sager

Duck breast tiradito is among the dishes with global flavors at the restaurant.

The little white house on slender India Street does not look much different from the rows of centuries-old buildings that line the cobblestoned streets of downtown Nantucket.

And things aren't that different inside the Proprietors Bar & Table. With its pale sage walls and neat banquettes lined with plump throw cushions, it is a modern take on a distinctly Nantucket look. But the menu reflects a more adventurous attitude: local seafood and greens are prepared with flourishes from Korean, Middle Eastern and other cuisines. Then again, adventurousness is baked into the island's culture.

"This is the epitome of Nantucket: it's strange, it's odd, it's funny, it's cute," said Orla LaScola, who opened the restaurant (named for the colonists from Massachusetts and New Hampshire who were the first landowners on the island) in June with her husband, Michael LaScola, and their executive chef, Tom Berry. (The LaScolas earned their local following at American Seasons, on nearby Centre Street.)

During a recent visit, the cocktail selection was the first sign of a bold and peripatetic approach, with ingredients that included Yufuin shochu, a Japanese barley liquor; quinoa vodka; and ginger-infused Mekhong, a sugar cane-inflected Thai spirit.

The menu is equally far-flung; Mr. Berry said his aim was to create a "well-traveled palate." Dishes, many of which are designed to be shared, included sweet shrimp coated with a spicy sauce and perched on a bed of cheesy masa. There are also tater cubes: potatoes cooked sous vide, shredded, formed into cubes, fried, then topped with Gouda, neon-pink slivers of pickled egg and joppiesaus, a creamy yellow Dutch sauce. Local seafood shows up in dishes like a delicious monkfish spiced up with a seafood kibbe and chanterelles. Shaved "Pork-Umms," a slider made with a kimchi biscuit stuffed with Berkshire pork and sesame barbecue sauce, was truly memorable.

For dessert, hot Moroccan doughnuts enticed, but it was the house-made soft-serve ice cream — a different flavor is offered every two weeks — that won us over. Our flavor that night: Valrhona chocolate and ricotta, sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts. It had the no-fuss simplicity of the seaside but also the sophistication to please that daring Nantucket soul.

The Proprietors Bar & Table, 9 India Street, Nantucket, Mass.; (508) 228-7477; proprietorsnantucket.com. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, is about $55.

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Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

Regarding "Getting Into the Spirit" (Oct. 13): while a former mental hospital might be the perfect setting for a pre-Halloween ghoulish overnight, I can't help but think at whose expense.

Loved ones of those unlucky enough to have been hospitalized in an institution that was meant to accommodate 250 patients but "housed nearly 10 times that number by the 1950s" might be more haunted by feelings of guilt and remorse than amused by the antics of thrill seekers who strain to hear the voices of former patients. Sadly, as anyone who has ever had to seek emergency mental health care in our country knows, mental hospitals are not theme parks, and patients who inhabit them are more than "a discontented bunch."

Cathy Bernard
New York City

To the Editor:

I can't believe how offensive this article is on so many levels: that a hospital has this tour; that someone would go to it; that someone would write about it; and, most offensive, that The New York Times would publish it as leisure.

Gloria Prevost
Columbia, S.C.

The writer is executive director of Protection and Advocacy for People with Disabilities Inc.

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Pursuits: Growing a Wine Destination in South Dakota

Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Clockwise from top left: Dave and Sue Greenlee at their Tucker's Walk Vineyard; views of the landscape, barrels and flowers at Valiant Vineyards Winery; and grapes at Tucker's Walk.

We buzzed past fields of corn and soybeans, down slippery dirt roads and around the occasional tractor. At times, my wife and I heard cattle groan and whiffed the acidic scent of manure amid a landscape dotted with peeling, wooden barns and silvery silos.

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Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Ashlee Bahnson-Kimberley sips a wine she and her husband make at Calico Skies Vineyard and Winery in Inwood, Iowa, near the South Dakota border.

This might not sound like your typical stretch of wine country, but we were indeed in the southeastern corner of South Dakota to visit wineries.

There were no marble statues or artfully trimmed hedges sitting on sprawling estates with gleaming tasting rooms. There were no locally grown merlots or cabernets or any of the classic varietals that entice oenophiles; we sampled mostly sweet concoctions made from grapes engineered to withstand the cold or local fruits like chokecherries, rhubarb and blackcurrant.

And while their wines most likely won't compete with those coming out of better-known northerly areas like Walla Walla or the Finger Lakes anytime soon, we found that what they may lack in elegance and grandeur, they make up for in homey charm, in large part thanks to the winemakers, who have mostly turned hobbies into full-time gigs and are a likable, down-to-earth bunch.

Wineries remain far down the list of tourism preferences in South Dakota, where breathtaking attractions like the Black Hills, the Badlands and Mount Rushmore reign supreme. But in recent years, they have carved a formidable niche in the state's agritourism market as landowners increasingly shun traditional cash crops for more exotic fields of fruits.

Over the past five years, the number of wineries in the state has increased from 15 to 25. The state's winemakers are expected to produce a total of more than 105,000 gallons of wine this year, breaking six figures for the first time — a far cry from the 230 gallons produced 16 years ago, when the state had just one winery. Wineries are reporting large increases in visits, and tour companies have recently started offering bus trips to wineries.

For the first time, the Baumberger Vineyard and Winery in Dell Rapids welcomed four busloads this summer, said Julie Baumberger, who runs the winery with her husband, Pete. Winemaking started as a hobby for Mr. Baumberger 20 years ago, but this year he and his wife have harvested 25,000 pounds of grapes, their largest haul yet. Visitors to their farmstead have come from as far away as Norway, Denmark and Australia, Ms. Baumberger said, adding, "It's really a unique way to meet with people and share kind of a fun experience with them."

There is a concentration of wineries in the Black Hills, but many are also clustered in this part of the state, a short drive from its largest urban hub, Sioux Falls. They provide the perfect excuse for vacationers to explore somewhere other than the scenic western part of the state, which is exactly what my wife and I did over two days late this summer.

Most of the wineries are on the very farms where the owners — and, sometimes, their cows or chickens — live. A tasting can feel like having tea in a friend's living room, if for no other reason than some of the tasting rooms are in houses or barns. The production facilities are equally pared down, often in garages cluttered with plastic buckets and tubes, and apparatuses for labeling and corking bottles by hand.

But the most intimate part of the experience is the conversation. Without crowds of guests to cater to, the vintners are eager to chat, sharing stories about how they turned a hobby into a dream job, about how they came up with label names like Sneaky Pete or about how a neighbor helped to capture their runaway Afghan hound by jumping from the back of a moving pickup truck to tackle it. Lost in a good story, a five-flight tasting can quickly turn into six or seven ("Just try this one for fun").

These chats also yielded valuable tips.

Adrienne Lewis, a host at Valiant Vineyards, the winery and bed-and-breakfast in Vermillion where we stayed, directed us to a hidden oasis along the Missouri River. We wound through tall corn pastures and down a gravel road before finding the narrow trail that opened to a vast, sandy beach along the river's banks with lush, wooded hills as a backdrop: a coastal paradise in the middle of the country. We plopped camping chairs down in the sand and enjoyed a bottle of rhubarb wine as the sun glistened off the rippling water.

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In Transit Blog: Airbnb Hosts Campaign Against New York Subpoena

Updated, 2:37 p.m. | New Yorkers who use Airbnb to rent out their homes are joining the company's fight against a subpoena that the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, filed earlier this month that demands records of some 15,000 hosts in New York State.

"Legalize Sharing: Save Airbnb in New York," the petition Mishelle Farer, a former Army sergeant, plans to deliver to the New York State Senate, has garnered nearly 50,000 signatures, exceeding its initial goal of 20,000.

"We're not slumlords," Ms. Farer wrote, adding that renting a room in her Brooklyn apartment has provided her with a source of income while she goes to school.

On Monday, Airbnb endorsed the "Legalize Sharing" petition. In an e-mail to New York users, Douglas Atkin, Airbnb's global head of community, wrote, "only if you make your voice heard will policy makers finally realize that overbroad laws are hurting you and hurting New York."

Airbnb has filed a motion in New York Supreme Court seeking to block the subpoena, which is based on a 2010 New York state law that bars renters from subletting properties for fewer than 30 days if they are not present. (That law does permit hosts like Ms. Farer to rent space in their apartments while they're staying there.)

Airbnb argues that the law was designed to crack down on businesses that were converting apartments or buildings into illegal hotels — not on the average Airbnb host.

David Hantman, Airbnb's head of global public policy, wrote earlier this month on the company's public policy blog that "we believe the Attorney General is only seeking to target an incredibly small number of bad actors who abuse the Airbnb platform."

"Even the politicians who wrote the original New York law agree it was never designed to target ordinary, everyday people who occasionally share their homes," he wrote, adding that while the company is willing to work with leaders in New York and other cities to ensure that its hosts pay applicable taxes, the company is committed to protecting our hosts' privacy and refuses to turn over its data.

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In Transit Blog: A Colorado Hotel With Plenty of Paleontology

Visitors to the Denver area can now spend a night in the museum –or at least at a dinosaur-themed hotel that is also part natural history museum.

The Best Western Denver Southwest in Lakewood, Colo., recently underwent a $4 million renovation that transformed the 112-room property into an immersive experience "that echoes an old explorers club," Meredith Tally, who owns the hotel along with her husband, Greg Tally, said in a telephone interview.

The lobby features louvered glass curiosity cabinets filled with fossils and reproduction dinosaur teeth; elements from an early-20th-century bank lobby; an antique fireplace; mahogany and pine paneling; overstuffed leather furniture; and a coffee table created from a vintage steam trunk — all meant to make guests feel as though  they've stepped back in time.

Dinosaur skulls, an interactive fossil table, a mock fossil dig and other items on display and used in the hotel's educational programs are touchable. "We want people to feel comfortable" Ms. Tally said. "For kids especially, learning about science is a very tactile experience."

Outside the property, visitors are greeted by a life-size stegosaurus statue named Stanley, and dinosaur-themed artwork is displayed throughout public spaces and in guest rooms. A new pool is shaped like a seaway of some 85 million years ago.

The hotel is 10 minutes from Dinosaur Ridge, Ms. Tally said, "where enormous school bus-size" stegosaurus skeletons were found and which is still an active site where fossils are being unearthed.

Also nearby are the Morrison Natural History Museum, Denver Museum of Nature and Science and Triceratops Trail.

For the self-proclaimed "armchair paleontologists," creating a hotel based on the area's dinosaur heritage "was an opportunity to do something unique, something original," Mr. Tally said. He said that they worked in consultation with paleontology experts to ensure scientific accuracy.

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In Transit Blog: Walkabout: Record Numbers for American Tourism in Cuba; TripAdvisor Plans Expansion

Bienvenidos Americans are visiting Cuba in record numbers despite strict travel restrictions, joining the hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans who travel there each year. (Reuters)

Vive La Baguette Due to a decline in bread consumption, the French Bakers' Lobby has begun a campaign to get people to eat more loaves. The campaign's slogan: "Hey there, did you pick up the bread?" (BBC)

New Frontier TripAdvisor, which began as a place to review hotels, restaurants and sights, and has morphed into hotel booking site, wants to become an in-destination personal concierge. (Skift)

Toy (Road) Story A Japanese travel agency is offering a somewhat counter-intuitive option: taking stuffed animals out into the world. Unagi Travel offers the service to the toys' owners, some of whom are physically impaired; photos of the resulting trips are shared on Facebook. (Kotaku)

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T Magazine: Accommodations | A New Hotel in L.A. Celebrates its Koreatown Surroundings

A stately yet unstuffy hotel injects style into the vibrant Los Angeles neighborhood.

In L.A.'s golden age, when streetcars clanged past urban orange groves and Carmen Miranda was Hollywood's nod to ethnicity, the high life thrived on a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard near Vermont Avenue. Today, a generation after gang wars and riots sapped the life out of this district, it has re-emerged as the lively epicenter of the city's Koreatown, bustling with restaurants, nightclubs and shops. The area has long been off the tourist map, but this is about to change with the opening of the Line in November.

The hotel's creator, Andrew Zobler, is the man behind the Beaux-Arts-style NoMad Hotel in Manhattan and the cheap-chic Freehand Miami hostel. But the Line, designed by Sean Knibb, is something different for both Zobler and Los Angeles. Korean-American culture — or at least a high-end permutation of it — is the 388-room establishment's organizing theme. ''There is so much good stuff coming out of Korea today, and nobody has really captured that in a hotel,'' Zobler says. Setting out to educate himself on Korean culture, he encountered the celebrated chef Roy Choi, who will preside over the hotel's two restaurants: Pot, which serves a new take on hot-pot cuisine, and Commissary, a vegetarian eatery. The 24-hour thrum of the neighborhood inspired Zobler to make the hotel an all-hours social hub. There will be a late-night bakery, a newsstand that never closes and a nightclub that stays open until the wee hours, called Speek, created by the twin brothers Mark and Jonnie Houston, who grew up just four blocks from the hotel.

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Lessons From Living in London

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The Millennium Bridge.

How do you make a new city your own? How do you turn it from a place you know as a tourist into a place you call home? How do you transform yourself from traveler to resident?

The things we notice when we visit cities are rarely the things we notice when we live in them, and so it was for me when I moved to North London and then West London from New York many years ago. (I have now moved back, which is a different story.)

I had been to London only perhaps a half-dozen times before I moved, and so I had lived in visitors' London: an intoxicating fairy tale of quirky architecture, treasure-filled museums, theater for every mood, exotic accents, stately parks, humorous food, royalty looming in the background and a subway system I could experience as amusing novelty rather than logistical necessity. Suddenly, all that went away, the days drew in, the autumn shadows fell, and London became instead about confronting the daily business of living: finding a decent grocery store and dealing with the impossibility of the gas company and learning to say rubbish bin instead of garbage can and having my shoes ruined by the rain.

New York dazzles with its energy; tourist London is that way, too, but the buzz dims quickly when you leave the center of town. While most people in New York live on top of one another in dense neighborhoods tightly packed together, in London they spread far into the distance, in discrete neighborhoods like Richmond and Bermondsey and Kennington, too many to know, each with its own High Street and its own iteration of the same stores: Boots the chain drugstore, Marks & Spencer the chain department store and Next the chain clothing store. Yet each neighborhood also has its own character.

I was lucky enough to sample two: first Islington, where I lived on a quiet little road around the corner from a bustling antiques market and the even more bustling Angel Tube stop. If I was in transition, so was Islington. Its dingy liquor stores, dreary sandwich shops and dodgy betting parlors were giving way to smart artisanal food shops featuring focaccia of the day and baked goods at $8 a go.

But my favorite shop has persevered: Steve Hatt's fishmonger, a family-run establishment full of siblings and parents and cousins. Perhaps the high point of my time in Islington, besides the time a duck came and hatched her brood in our back garden, was when I bought a piece of salmon that, according to the sign above it, had been caught by old Mr. Hatt himself — the great-grandfather of the current crop of Hatts, I think.

Residents tend to feel more connected to their neighborhoods than to London as a whole, and because it can be an undertaking to travel to another part of town for a social occasion, geography starts to feel like destiny. So when I lived in Kensington, I got used to staying fairly close to home. This meant eating often at Jakob's, a homey little restaurant and takeout place on Gloucester Road that sold vegetable-centric dishes and salads. It meant visiting Itsu, in nearby Notting Hill, a high-concept Japanese restaurant where the sushi swirled past on a conveyor belt. Notting Hill also had two beautiful old movie theaters, the Gate and the Coronet, and all the charm of Greenwich Village, without the crowds (except when Portobello Market was in session, on Fridays and Saturdays).

There was my favorite clothing store on Kensington Church Street, which sold expensive but mercifully non-ill-fitting jeans, and then Ffiona's, where a wholesome meal with enticing meat dishes and fish and vegetables served family-style was served up by none other than Ffiona herself. We also had, on Gloucester Road, a Partridge's store that sold all the American foods I missed: Skippy peanut butter, Toll House chocolate chips, breakfast cereals consisting mostly of fluorescent marshmallows.

Three of the city's best museums for children — the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and the Science Museum — were short walks away, and in the park there was a cunning, pirate-themed playground dedicated to Diana, the late Princess of Wales, that my two girls loved when they were little.

We ventured farther afield, of course; we liked especially to take the children to St. Paul's Cathedral and then across the Millennium Bridge (the city's best walk, to my mind) and into the Tate Modern gallery, a spectacular building fashioned from a decommissioned power station on the south bank of the Thames. Once we all spontaneously responded to Olafur Eliasson's giant sun, positioned on a mirrored ceiling, by lying on the ground and basking, as if it we were at the beach.

We went to Shakespeare's Globe, a facsimile of the 16th-century theater, where seats are cheap and a spot on foot, for theatergoers known as groundlings, is even cheaper. For a day out we might go to Hampstead, a little town unto itself in North London with the wildest park in the city, a place to lose yourself amid the trees.

Sarah Lyall, formerly a New York Times correspondent in London, is now a writer at large based in New York.

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In Transit Blog: Calendar: Coming Events in Amsterdam; San Antonio, Tex.; London

Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, Amsterdam The work of the early-20th-century Russian avant-garde pioneer Kazimir Malevich, above, is the subject of a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from Oct. 19 to Feb. 2, 2014, and the museum's first dedicated to a key figure from its collection since reopening in 2012. The retrospective will include more than 500 works by the artist as well as those by contemporaries like Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky. The exhibition is accompanied by lectures, discussion evenings and opportunities to create D.I.Y. Malevich-inspired postcards and life-size compositions.

Meat festivals in Austin and San Antonio, Tex. For dedicated carnivores, Texas beckons in early November. At Meatopia Texas on Nov. 2 to 3, the annual New York City event will be in San Antonio for the first time when 33 chefs will prepare meats like beef, bison, duck, quail — "from snout to tail" — over live fires. Smoked meats rule at the Texas Monthly's TMBBQ Fest on Nov. 3 in Austin, which showcases restaurants on its Top 50 BBQ Joints list. (Advance tickets are sold out, but some walk-up tickets will be available.) At the Wine & Swine Annual Pig Roast, an outdoor charity event for the Austin Food and Wine Alliance on Nov. 10 in Austin, chefs will serve their best pork dishes, alongside wine tastings and spirited cocktails. All three festivals feature top-name chefs, live music and cold beer.

Picture This: Children's Illustrated Classics, London Peter Pan, Paddington Bear and Willy Wonka are among the storybook characters featured at a new show that explores art from classic children's books from the 20th century. The show, through Jan. 26, 2014 at the British Library in London, focuses on how illustrators have interpreted — and reinterpreted — 10 popular tales, including "The Hobbit," "The Wind in the Willows" and "The Borrowers." The free exhibition features rare editions, original artwork and personal correspondence and is accompanied by workshops, panel discussions and special events for children.

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