Couples planning for Valentine’s Day could have themselves quite a fancy evening dining solely on some local wine and cheese, which has been judged among the best in Pennsylvania.

Western Pennsylvania wine and cheesemakers once again came home with a good deal of accolades from the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show, held this month in Harrisburg.

“I brought eight wines, and they all ended up with medals,” said a happy Frank Mazzotta, owner of Mazzotta Winery in Richland.

Mazzotta’s boutique winery has made regular, multiple appearances on the farm show’s awards list the past few years.

“We do it the old-fashioned way, taking fruit, fermenting it and making it into wine,” he said. “There’s no additives, no flavor enhancers. It tastes like what it’s supposed to taste like — juice that’s alcoholic.”

Mazzotta’s 2024 peach wine earned not just a silver medal but a “best fruit wine” designation. He also brought home two silver and five bronze medals.

Just a few miles northeast of Mazzotta, La Vigneta Winery owner Francesca Howden is celebrating another good year at the farm show. Her wines came home with four silver medals and a bronze.

“We definitely take the competition very seriously,” she said. “My team works really hard to make sure our wines are produced to the highest standard.”

And if you’d care for some cheese to pair with those wines?

Look no further than Indiana Township’s Goat Rodeo Farm & Dairy, whose Wild Rosemary took the silver medal in the best of show category. It also earned a first-place finish in the mixed milk category, and the farm’s Cowboy Coffee cheese took third place in the same category. Finally, Goat Rodeo’s chevre cheese took first place in the goat’s milk category.

Mazzotta and Howden said they use feedback from the show in a variety of ways.

“We use those results to determine how much of these wines we want to produce,” Mazzotta said. “We use the awards to know which ones people will like when we go to an off-premise sale. It’s kind of guidance for a winemaker in terms of how much to make.”

Howden said La Vigneta also makes some of its plans for the coming year based on feedback from the farm show.

“For example, when we won the Governor’s Cup in 2023 for our blush, that let us know we needed to produce more of that particular wine,” she said. “But we also get feedback throughout the year on what customers like and what’s popular. That really helps us tweak and refine our wines. The farm show just validates a lot of that and shows whether you’ve produced wine that the public likes and the judges can recognize.”

Howden said she also uses the results to do some research.

“I want to see and taste the wine that won this year’s Governor’s Cup,” she said. “We look at the awards other wineries win, taste each other’s wines and that’s helpful as well, to see what struck the judges’ interest this year.”

Brewers

Western Pennsylvania beer breweries had some stiff competition from their counterparts out east, but Vandergrift-based Allusion Brewing Company, which also has a taproom in Hampton, brought home three third-place finishes.

“We brought back ribbons for our Baker Street Brown Ale, a London-style brown, our Abby Normal, a Munich-style dunkel, and our Christmas ale called Jolly Old Elf,” said co-owner and head brewer John Bieranoski. “We’ve been competing since 2022, and we’ve medaled at least once every year.”

With the farm show taking place in January, Bieranoski said he treats the judges’ feedback as a way to help refine his products for future competitions.

Judges at the farm show have come through the Beer Judge Certification Program, a nonprofit that offers education and certification for competition judges. Those same judges tally the scores at most of the major competitions Allusion enters.

“We do several each year,” he said. “Last year, we brought home a first- and third-place from the farm show, for our traditional Polish ale. And after that, we brought home two national competition wins with it. We used feedback from the judges to bring our product to the next level.”

In addition to Allusion, Mars brewery Stick City earned a third-place finish in the Pale Bitter European Lager category for its Arctos 12 beer. And farther north, the Clarion River Brewing Co. finished first in the same category with its Golden Eagle; second among Strong Belgian Ales (Cacao Cupidon) and British Beer (Premature Burial); and third in the Amber European Lager category (Autumn Leaf Fiest).

Grains

In the grains division, Westmoreland County farmers brought home hardware of their own.

As a matter of fact, New Alexandria farmer Fred Slezak is Pennsylvania’s Grand Champion of Grains for 2026. He took first place for his barley and fourth place for his wheat — not a bad showing for his first time competing at the show.

“It’s a real honor,” said Slezak, who beat out Crabtree’s Vince Mangini in the barley category. Mangini took second place.

Both men grow grains for Allegheny Mountain Malt, which has partnered with local brewers to supply locally grown grains in an effort to shorten the supply chain. In addition, Hempfield farmer Alquin Heinnickel took third place in the oats category.

“We didn’t have things as bad, weatherwise, as the rest of the state,” Mangini said. “We got the right amount of rain at the right time.”

Slezak said growing barley specifically bred for malting probably helped him with the judges.

“It’s got a larger kernel than most other barleys,” Slezak said. “I credit Vince for encouraging me to enter, and my partner Brandon Yeo prepared the barley and did a lot of the planting. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it entered.”

Mangini said the grains division is also somewhat of a beauty contest.

“Fred did a really good job cleaning his grain, using some special screens to process his barley,” he said. “I told him it’s on now — I’m coming after him now that he beat me.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is guesting on Stephen Colbert‘s The Late Show Monday, and there isn’t anything FCC head Brendan Carr can do about it — or as a result of it.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission released new guidance that could revoke the exemption to its “equal time” rules that daytime and late-night talk shows have enjoyed since the ’90s. Basically, the equal time policy requires TV stations to provide equivalent amounts of air time to political candidates on both sides of the same election. (The onus is not on the specific show or even the broadcast network — it is the individual stations that must balance the scales. It’s also a bit on the campaigns themselves. When free time is provided to a candidate, a record is placed in the station’s political file. Opposing candidates can then submit an equal opportunities request.) Often the discrepancy is resolved with free commercial time to the candidate who was not booked on television.

The equal time rule has not historically applied to news coverage, and in 1996, Jay Leno’s producers won a carveout for talk shows. The Tonight Show performs “bona fide” news interviews, they argued, and thus should be granted the same exemption as a newscast. The FCC agreed, and late-night shows and daytime programs were no longer beholden to the requirement. (And perhaps not coincidentally, the following year, The View was launched.)

Until now.

“Importantly, the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” the FCC wrote on Wednesday, Jan. 21. “Moreover, a program that is motivated by partisan purposes, for example, would not be entitled to an exemption under long-standing FCC precedent.”

The Hollywood Reporter reached out to the FCC on Monday with a request for comment on this story, though we did not immediately receive a response.

Carr is targeting programming that leans left; he is President Donald Trump’s FCC chair, after all. Shapiro is a Democrat, and Colbert is among the most outspoken critics of Trump this side of, well, The View.

Shapiro, the sitting governor of Pennsylvania, but the equal time rule does not apply to politicians — it applies to political candidates. And through Shapiro officially launched his reelection campaign on Jan. 8 with events in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia — here comes the technicality — he is not yet legally a candidate for the office he currently holds. Pennsylvania law will not recognize Shapiro (or anyone else) as a gubernatorial candidate until Feb. 17, which is the first day to circulate and file nomination petitions. Then, Shapiro will need 2,000 signatures of support, a $200 check to file his candidacy, and a statement of financial interest to make the ballot.

Until then, Shapiro is on the trail — though not necessarily (or at least entirely) the campaign trail. The first-term governor is doing the talk show circuit pushing his memoir, Where We Keep the Light. Gov. Shapiro will appear on Tuesday’s episode of The View, and like CBS following tonight’s airing of The Late Show, your local ABC station need not set aside any airtime for Shapiro’s Republican opponent, Pennsylvania State Treasurer Stacy Garrity.

The late night TV hosts are laughing off the latest FCC crackdown. On Thursday, the day after Carr targeted the time slot, Colbert feigned shock.

“What? What? A new crackdown on late night TV? That has enormous implications for me for four more months,” Colbert said. Oh yeah, did we mention his show was canceled?

Colbert added, “So, let’s talk about these new crackdown rules that my lawyer warned me not to talk about. The FCC is announcing plans to enforce long-dormant rules on appearances by political candidates on network talk shows. Oh, no. They’ve awakened the long-dormant rules, not seen since the mind-bending horrors of the pre-Euclidian variety show ‘Cthulhu Tonight!’ This is clearly an attempt to silence me, Jimmy [Kimmel and] Seth [Meyers].”

The same night, Jimmy Kimmel told America, “I might need your help again.” Jimmy Kimmel Live! was suspended this past summer for a few nights after Kimmel made a monologue joke that presumed the political leanings of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Though Carr certainly inserted himself into that controversy, it was the local ABC affiliates that really got the ball rolling. Jimmy Kimmel Live! returned to the airwaves after a few nights on ice, helping to cool the national temperature down some.

Pennsylvania rarely sees true snow avalanches because it lacks the high, open alpine terrain where they typically form.

First responders were busy this weekend responding to winter-weather emergencies of all kinds, including a rare report of an “avalanche” in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Duryea police issued an urgent traffic advisory Sunday afternoon after “significant avalanches” blocked Coxton Road beyond the 900 block, leaving the roadway impassable due to snow and debris.

Snow avalanches are extremely rare in Pennsylvania and aren’t a routine hazard for first responders the way they are in the Rockies, Cascades or even parts of New England. Classic avalanches typically require long, steep, largely treeless starting zones where snow can build into a deep, unstable slab—terrain Pennsylvania generally lacks.

In this case, the “avalanche” description likely refers to a snowslide or slide of snow mixed with debris coming off a steep slope or road cut, events that can occur during intense snowfall, especially when wind and accumulating snow overload an embankment.

The winter storm brought widespread heavy snowfall to the region. By late Sunday afternoon, the National Weather Service’s Binghamton office listed reports of around a foot of snow in parts of Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, including 13.0 inches near Dallas and 12.0 inches reported in multiple nearby locations.

Snow continued into Sunday evening across northeastern Pennsylvania and central New York as the storm persisted.

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