Sacramento’s hospitality trade is to get a shot of adrenaline, personality and money next week when an anticipated 12,000 persons roll into town for the 29^th Unified Grape & Wine Symposium.

The nation’s largest wine conference, Unified will be staged mostly at the Sacramento Convention Center, where attendees will meander through an exhibit hall filled with some 850 vendors selling everything from printing services to pruning shears, bottles to bungs.

When established or aspiring grape growers and winemakers aren’t on the exhibit floor kicking tires on the latest models of tractors and shaking their heads over the latest price hike for oak barrels, they will be upstairs taking their seats for a series of presentations to bring them up to speed on recent developments and current trends in viticulture and enology – disease-resistant vines, vineyard automation, smoke taint and the like.

At night, they will file into restaurant, ballroom and saloon to continue their deep dive into wine.

We’re here to help their exploration. For the first time in three pandemic years, Unified is expected to resume its earlier energy, with registration approaching pre-Covid levels and a record number of exhibitors lined up. Over the past couple of years, Sacramento has seen a surge in wine bars, in particular wine bars with extensive selections of “natural” wine.

For the benefit of out-of-towers unfamiliar with the city’s shifting wine scene, an introduction:

Betty wine director Sarah Milstein, left, and Betty owner Colleen Fleming.

Betty Wine Bar & Bottle Shop: Sacramento’s newest wine bar is also its most homey, taking root in a downtown neighborhood as residential as it is commercial. The welcoming and convivial setting includes a fetching backyard garden. The wine selection is among the more ambitious and varied in the city, running to some 300 choices, with an emphasis on Sonoma County, Napa Valley and Europe, but not overlooking Sacramento-area appellations. Owner Colleen Fleming and wine director Sarah Milstein favor small family producers keen on sustainable and organic farming, with little intervention in the cellar. Fleming previously co-owned Cadet Wine Bar in Napa, but sold her interest two years ago and moved to Sacramento for its affordability, also sensing that the growing and diversifying community would welcome a stylish wine bar. Milstein put in stints with Flatiron Wines & Spirits in New and Corti Brothers and Taylor’s Market of Sacramento before joining Fleming. York Betty’s menu runs to small plates, sandwiches and salads, many of them with an Italian bent. The name “Betty” was inspired by and is in tribute to Fleming’s late grandmother, who she admired for her spunk and her appreciation of finer things in life. Betty Wine Bar & Bottle Shop, 1103 T St., is open 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.

Franquette: Taken from the French expression “à la bonne franquette” – translated variously as casual, simple, informal – Franquette is a bright, laid-back coffee café and wine bar in West Sacramento’s growing Bridge District, along the west bank of Sacramento River. Franquette is close to Sutter Health Park, home to the Sacramento River Cats, and looks out at downtown Sacramento’s rising urban skyline. The strictly French wine list is in line with the bar’s intent to cultivate a relaxed, even playful vibe, emphasizing not so much Burgundy and Bordeaux as underrepresented appellations like Alsace, Loire and Jura and the often-overlooked grape varieties and accessible wine styles for which they are recognized. Franquette, to be a year old in February, is the creation of principal players behind the acclaimed East Sacramento restaurant Canon – Brad Cecchi, Clay Nutting and Jack Winks. The culinary artist at work in the Franquette kitchen is Paris-trained chef Elena Winks, an early hire at Canon as pastry chef. Not surprisingly, Franquette’s compact menu tilts French – oysters, beef tartare, boulettes de canard, warm frisée with lardons, pot de crème and lemon tarte. Franquette, 965 Bridge St., West Sacramento, is open daily 7 a.m.-8 p.m. except Mondays, when it closes at 4 p.m.

Bennett Cross, owner, Good News Wine.

Good News Wine: Smack dab in the middle of midtown Sacramento’s Lavender Heights, Good News Wine focuses on “natural wines,” but with qualification. “We lean on the cleaner style of natural,” says Bennett Cross, who with his wife Jennifer opened Good News Wine in the fall of 2021. On the spectrum of natural wines, from “funky” and “nasty” to “fresh” and “stable,” Good News Wine favors the latter. Rather than promote the place as a natural-wine bar, the Crosses rather want it to be seen as aligned with producers who favor sustainable, organic, pre-industrial farming practices and a light hand at winemaking. The couple’s portfolio runs to lighter, fresher, lower-alcohol and higher-acid wines, and if they are from such off-the-beaten-wine-path countries like Canada and Serbia, all the better. California isn’t ignored, with current pours from bottles originating in Green Valley, Carmel Valley and Calaveras County, as well as elsewhere in the state. Meat and cheese boards, finger snacks and tinned fish dominate the concise menu. Bennett Cross has a professional background in specialty coffee and craft beer, and when he expressed interest in learning more of wine his wife enrolled him in an introductory wine class at Solano Cellars in Berkeley. That in turn led them to hanging out at The Punchdown, a natural-wine bar in Oakland, where they were living. After moving to Sacramento, they couldn’t find anything like The Punchdown. “We had a hard time finding a place to learn more of wine and to just enjoy it, so we saw an opportunity for a place that felt good and was an easy and fun place to learn of wine,” says Bennett Cross in explaining the couple’s motivation to launch Good News Wine. Good News Wine, 1050 20^th St., is open noon-9 p.m. Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, noon-10 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 9:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturdays.

Lucid Winery & Tasting Room: Sacramento is home to many urban breweries, but wineries, not so much. Lucid Winery & Tasting Room is an exception. Technically, Lucid isn’t a wine bar, but a working winery with tasting room along fashionable R Street in the middle of town. Kevin Luther, who early in his winemaking career was most closely identified with Wise Villa Winery in Placer County, launched his own Lucid and Voluptuary brands in 2020, just as Covid-19 began its assault. He adapted quickly and smartly, arranging virtual tastings, and soon was in position to relocate from the outskirts of Sacramento to the heart of the city, where he shares duties in overseeing the tasting room with his brother Jerome. While pours at Lucid are limited to Luther’s own labels, his restless, inventive nature has led to a broad and varied lineup. He takes a natural-wine approach to fruit grown largely in the Sierra foothills and Lodi. In addition to usual suspects like Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, his releases include Picpoul Blanc, Tannat, Grenache, Barbera and a “skin-contact” Chardonnay blend. Beer/wine hybrids, pet-nats and mead also figure into the picture at any given time. Lucid Winery & Tasting Room, 1015 R St., is open 3 p.m.-10 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Sundays.

Nicholas “Nico” Corich at his wine bar Nico.

Nico Wine: Small and sunny Nico Wine, in Sacramento’s eclectic Ice Blocks district along R Street, is modeled on the unpretentious, intimate and cheerful wine bars of Paris. “Nico Wine is bright and energetic, both in terms of wines and atmosphere. It’s a place that welcomes discovery. We’re not a dusty old-boy’s club where wine is inspected and rated,” says owner Nicholas “Nico” Corich in defining the feeling he seeks with Nico Wine. “We want to be a safe place for discovery,” he adds. And what visitors will discover at Nico Wine is a wide range of natural wines – 150 to 200 in stock at any one time. Corich isn’t crazy about promoting Nico as a “natural-wine” bar, however. “I hate the term ‘natural’ because it ends up being a point of contention, rather than a helpful descriptor,” he says. Instead, he talks of bringing in wines that represent sensitive farming practices, worker welfare, offbeat grape varieties like Cabernet Pfeffer, and minimally manipulated winemaking, including such practices as native-yeast fermentations and few or no additives. “It’s all about allowing grapes to taste and react differently from one harvest to the next. It’s not about chasing points and ratings,” Corich says. “In fact, I’ve taken ‘natural wine’ off our branding because we want to make sure the experience we’re offering is inclusive and welcoming.” Corich is relatively new to the wine trade, opening Nico Wine in the fall of 2021 after working as a harvest intern at Swick Wines in Newberg, Oregon. “I fell in love with the winemaking process, the farming, and the people. Winemakers are the most generous people I have ever met – their lives revolve around giving their time to an ancient craft,” Corich says. Nico Wine, 1710 R St., is open 4 p.m.-10 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, noon-10 p.m. Thursdays, noon-11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, noon-10 p.m. Sundays.

Jaspar Nahid, Ro Sham Beaux’s wine buyer, pours a taste for Addam Reagan, the bar’s operations director.

Ro Sham Beaux: Though just two years old, Ro Sham Beaux is Sacramento’s original “natural-wine” bar, quickly establishing itself as an unusually spirited midtown destination. (That it is next door to popular Ginger Elizabeth Patisserie doesn’t hurt in drawing traffic.) The wine selection at Ro Sham Beaux is more compact than it is at other Sacramento wine bars, running at any one time to about 60 choices, but it is exceptionally diverse, with releases from Sonoma to Suditrol, Clarksburg to Campania, Maryland to Moselle. It offers a variety of pet-nats, a creative cocktail program, and a high number of regional wine labels such as The End of Nowhere, Haarmeyer, Clos Saron, Tabeaux and Perch. The natural wines featured at Ro Sham Beaux spring from the typical standards associated with the genre, such as organic and biodynamic farming practices, indigenous-yeast fermentations, and little or no sulfur additions, says winemaker Addam Reagan of Tabeaux Cellars in Amador County, one of five principals behind Ro Sham Beaux. Others include brothers Henry and Simon de Vevre White, whose other projects include the Snug bar, Butterscotch Lounge and the former de Vevre’s Irish Pub in Sacramento and Davis. The short but rangy menu includes assorted imported cheeses, a grilled Brie sandwich, a shiitake chowder, and the requisite tinned fish. “Ro Sham Beaux,” as indicated by art on the bar’s front windows, is a play on the Chinese hand game often called “roshambo,” also known as “rock paper scissors,” a repetitive exercise that ultimately motivated the partners to settle on the name Ro Sham Beaux. Ro Sham Beaux, 2413 J St., is open 2 p.m.-11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 2 p.m.-midnight Fridays, noon-midnight Saturdays, noon-10 p.m. Sundays.

More traditional and generally older wine destinations in Sacramento include:

Acheson Wine Company, 1629 19^th St.

Fizz Champagne & Bubbles Bar, 615 David J. Stern Walk.

Revolution Winery & Kitchen, 2831 S St.

The Grand, 1600 L St.

The Rind, 1801 L St.

The Underground Tasting Room, 900 2^nd St.

Vine+Grain, 414 K St.

WHIRED Wine Bar, 410 L St., with an auxiliary WHIRED Wine Window at the former Senator Hotel, 1121 L St.