Bracco, Fleming top draws at 'Women in Wine'

"The Sopranos" was the hottest of the hot and Lorraine Bracco, who played seemingly unflappable psychiatrist Dr. Melfi on the HBO show, was fielding endorsement offers like Donovan McNabb after the Super Bowl.

"But I didn't want to sell makeup or hair products. It just wasn't me," Bracco recalled recently.

What was her, she said, was a nice barolo or pinot grigio. Thus, when Italian wine producers suggested putting her name on a line of wines from around her ancestral country, she responded enthusiastically.

Imagine Coco Chanel going down a table of potential perfume scents and picking No. 5 in the lineup.

"I went to a whole bunch of vineyards all over Italy, and I asked them not to tell me how much it costs and not to tell me all the production values, and I just picked what I liked," she said.

Bracco and her wines will be part of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa's third annual "Women in Wine" event tomorrow, a celebration of wines made and chosen by women that's also a charity event supporting breast cancer research and victims of domestic violence.

The Borgata Event Center will have tasting areas for about a dozen different wine lines. There will be two auctions, one silent and one live, for spectacular wine, travel, food and entertainment-related items.

"Opus One donated a private tasting. There is a trip through Chile and Argentina for two to seven wineries," said Anjoleena Griffin-Holst, the Borgata's wine director. "This is a premier event, something that you won't see anywhere else."

The chefs from the Borgata restaurants - Bobby Flay Steak, the Homestead, Wolfgang Puck American Grille, Speccio and Ombra - will offer their specialties, while Michael Mina, the chef at SeaBlue, will do lunch for those who buy a Premium Plus ticket at $295.

Former Olympic skating gold medalist Peggy Fleming, who is also a winemaker with her Fleming Jenkins label from California, will be there, too. Fleming is a breast cancer survivor, and $2 from every bottle sold of Victories, the Fleming Jenkins rose, goes to breast cancer research.

Fleming, talking from her home in Los Gatos, Calif., near San Jose, said her winery came about mostly as a landscaping venture.

"My son had a half-pipe skateboarding course back there, and when he went away to college, we wanted to do something different, so we planted wine grapes," she said. Her husband retired from his dermatology practice and took courses in winemaking at the University of California at Davis.

They rented space in an old building in town with another winery and started putting out chardonnay, sirah, cabernet and the Victories rose.

"Then, through this event, I met more women winemakers and then women who were breast-cancer survivors, so it has opened up new channels for both of those interests of mine," said Fleming.

The evening will culminate, after the live auction, with an Iron-Chef-like standoff between two celebrity chefs - Michael Schulson, of the Style Network's "Pantry Raid," and Geoffrey Zakarian, chef-owner of the Town and Country restaurants in New York.

Among the items for auction are opportunities to be their sous chefs and another to be a "Pantry Raid" judge.

To prove that the casino is of a certain lifestyle, Borgata has induced Robin Leach to co-host of the event, along with actress Ricki Lake, who recently played a breast-cancer survivor in the Lifetime movie, "Matters of Life & Dating." *

Borgata Casino Hotel & Spa, One Borgata Way, 7 p.m. tomorrow, $195-$295, 609-317-1000, www.theborgata.com.