Wanda Hennig trained as a journalist on newspapers in South Africa. As editor of a Sunday lifestyle magazine and then as Durban bureau chief for Cosmopolitan, her specialty subjects became people and travel, with its henchmen, food, and drink. "I once ate a portion of a sheep's testicle at a nightclub with belly dancers in Abidjan, the capital of the Cote D'Ivoire, West Africa—and once was enough. On the other hand, there are the pastries of Chef Michel Willaume at San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton. I might have kept on eating them until I popped." And cigars and schnapps? "I don't do them often. But when you've had a jolly meal with good friends in Berkeley, and after aromatic Ethiopian coffee these get passed around the table—why resist?"

Wanda has followed her taste buds to the wineries of the Santa Cruz Mountains.