PERHAPS YOU'RE LIKE me, and you've passed certain businessy warehouse districts in San Francisco for a decade without ever really wondering what the hell is going on in those warehouses. Perhaps life then unexpectedly shuffled you into one of these buildings, as it did me, and you rode the glass elevator up to a carpeted floor, and you were mystified by hallways of offices that seemed cool and empty behind their glass doors, and bore vaguely self-help-y names like Phoenix and Odyssey. If you were me – after twirling confused through the seemingly deserted space, accidentally walking into the wrong bathroom, and startling a man in mid-urination – you would be so very happy to then stumble into the brightly colored Oz of SmartsCo, a tiny publishing house run by two friendly ladies engaged in the exploration of what they've deemed "life's greatest pleasures": to date, wine, chocolate, food, and sex.

"We go back and forth about babies," copublisher Julie Tucker says, considering what future great pleasures SmartsCo might choose to build its deck of playful question-and-answer cards on. "To many people it is; to many people it's not. But to many people wine isn't. We debate. Baseball – is that a great pleasure? To me it certainly isn't! I think film would be great – basically all our hobbies, the things we do after work. The options are endless."

In business for a scant two years, SmartsCo is rapidly growing. Its flagship product, the stylishly packaged wine trivia game Wine Smarts, has already sold 30,000 copies, and that's without a major bookstore distributor.

"About two years ago, in February of 2002, I had just quit my job," Tucker recounts. "I was in tech, corporate America. I was really fascinated with wine, and I was reading these crazy long snooty books about wine, and they weren't useful."

Killing time on a road trip by culling quiz questions from the unhelpful wine tomes, Tucker got the idea of creating a fun and demystifying wine-themed Q&A package to market to folks like herself: young professionals intimidated by the elitist world of the grape but with the time and money to investigate it on their own terms. Tucker describes SmartsCo's target audience as "people who are younger and youthful and stylish. If you look at wine things, it's all burgundy with harvest grapes on it. That's why we're getting a lot of success – people aren't into the sad burgundy colors. And lots of young people do like wine."

Tucker hooked up with copublisher Jennifer Elias to produce the game's tomato red-and-dark orange box, as well as the true-or-false and multiple-choice questions on the colorful cards inside. (Question: Which is not an area of the Rhône Valley? True or false: French wine regulators require winemakers to age wine in French oak barrels? What is Languedoc?)

"She has another business, which is a wine-tasting business," Tucker says of her partner's qualifications. But Elias's diverse history (she formerly worked at the Haight Street Free Clinic) has enabled the duo to trot after one of life's more unanimously agreed-upon pleasures, the forthcoming Sex Smarts game.

"Jennifer wrote this," Tucker says of the questions printed on the game cards. "Her background in public health was really useful. The editor for this is Sharon Marcus. She's a professor at Columbia in the history of human sexuality."

The Sex Smarts game cards are divided into four categories: Dirty Talk, Carnal Culture, Bodies, and Wild Card – the last one decorated with images that include a whip and pair of handcuffs.

"It's just funny," Tucker says, laughing, delighted with the game. She reads me a question: "In colonial New England, 16-year-old Thomas Grazer confessed to having sex with several animals. Which was not one of them?" Hmmmm. I guess turkey, and I am wrong.

"We have this Dirty Talk category, which is vocabulary," Tucker explains. The Bodies section has questions along the lines of the exact length of porn star John Holmes's notoriously large penis, and as for the Wild Card? "This is sort of random facts," she says. Such as, Which of the following are not Kama Sutra acts of love: Rules of cock fighting, Painting and decoration, Science of aqueducts, or Domestication of wild bulls. My hunch tells me it's aqueducts, but I'd been sure the colonial teenager couldn't have possibly gotten it on with a turkey, and I was wrong.

"It's just about embracing sexuality," Tucker says of the deck. "There's a lot of people who don't understand certain preferences, and it opens them up."

The women of SmartsCo plan to unleash their new deck upon the world this fall, through a big launch party with Planned Parenthood's Golden Gate Action Fund, which is the political arm dedicated to electing pro-choice candidates to office and getting rid of George W. Bush. And as if the prospect of dumping the current president isn't enough to get you excited, Tucker promises, "It's going to be really fun, with a lingerie party and lots of good stuff."

Esoteric sex practices, colonial bestiality, lingerie, and politics? If this is your perfect mix of activities, go to www.smartsco.com for information.