Livermore Valley Opera will open its 31^st season with a production of Donizetti’s  The Elixir of Love. This beloved comic opera hearkens back to a simpler time of rural farm workers, kind landowners and traveling salesmen. LVO’s take on this operatic classic is to set it in pre-war Livermore Valley wine country, where pioneering men like Charles Wetmore and his Cresta Blanca winery garnered California its first international wine award and patriarch Carl Wente’s plantings of chardonnay would establish the generic roots of nearly 80% of today’s plantings of that varietal.