Tasting the Wine Country: Recipes from Romantic Inns and Resorts

Great food, wine, and music for perfect getaways at home! Chefs from 21 acclaimed inns and resorts offer more than 100 dishes for breakfast and dinner, all formatted for the home cook. Inspiring paintings, quotations, and photography will transport you to the wine country. The music CD offers brilliant performances by Grammy-Award winning musicians. Their joyful music combines classical, bluegrass, Latin, and jazz. To your health and happiness!

Sharon O'Connor was the first person ever to pair a cookbook with music. What seems like a simple idea food and music are a natural combination is actually the culmination of years of life experience. As O'Connor puts it, Menus and Music has packaged up my life.

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with degrees in music and sociology, O'Connor trained at the renowned Amsterdam Conservatory of Music. She began her career as a performer with the San Francisco Ballet and Opera and has worked with famed performers such as Frank Sinatra, Van Morrison, Tony Bennett and Linda Ronstadt. She has also recorded with the American Conservatory Theater, Aretha Franklin, John Williams, and for numerous Hollywood film scores. She continued her musical career as the founder and cellist of the San Francisco String Quartet.

A lifelong amateur chef, O'Connor began looking for a way to combine her loves for music, food, travel, and writing. Twelve years ago, while driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge after a performance with her string quartet, she came up with the idea for Menus and Music.

Now, fourteen volumes later, O'Connor travels the world to research each cookbook and is an expert in adapting recipes from professional chefs for the home cook. Equal time is devoted to meeting with other musicians, mixing, arranging, editing, and performing the musical selections on the compact discs.

Sharon O'Connor makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two daughters and husband. Her family enthusiastically helps in the research, travel, and tasting for her series.