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Alan’s View

September 2010

ASD Picks: 3 Best U.S. Wine Festivals

Talk about the cart before the horse! Three months ago, my wife won a two-night stay at the Grand Regent Hotel in Bordeaux at a charity auction. As a result, we made a stop in Bordeaux on a quick trip that would have otherwise only included Paris and London. I’ll tell you more about Bordeaux in our next e-letter, but suffice it to say that it is impossible to go there without having wine (and for me, wine festivals) top-of-mind.

Lest we forget, wine was humankind’s first cocktail, predating both cider and beer. Wine has been the boisson de preference of the social elite and the proletariat’s substitute for drinking water. It has anointed the bodies of pharaohs and enlivened the feasts of Roman kings. As the story goes, the world’s first wine appeared around 8,000 years ago when a Prussian man hid wild grapes in a jar marked “poison,” only to have the fermented fruit discovered by a suicidal concubine. In Egypt, only nobles and pharaohs were worthy of this venerable liquid that dissolved the day’s troubles. With the domestication of the vine came the birth of the wine industry, whose production and trade grew with Western civilization.

The world’s love affair with wine is evidenced not only by the profusion of wine-growing areas, but also by tastings, auctions, trade shows, and street fairs. The Greeks praised the god Dionysus for wine, thanking him each December with some of the world’s first festivals. Although many wine festivals today are exclusive events aimed at the trade, some are open to the public and loads of fun. Perhaps the best wine events are the street parties in the world’s greatest grape-growing regions, where everyone’s invited and few are sniffing corks.

At the bi-annual Bordeaux Wine Festival, begun when the city launched its rebirth 15 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people celebrate with music, fireworks, and a tasting of what is arguably the world’s best wine and food. For more than 70 years, party-seekers have gathered in the Tuscan town of Impruneta for the Chianti Grape Harvest Festival (late September, near Florence, Italy), where parades and wine stalls fill the streets, and the finest local vintages are sampled and savored. In the heartland of Spain’s Rioja wine region, six sleepless days are spent hailing the vines with bullfights, fireworks, dancing, and, yes, plenty of guzzling, at the Rioja Grape Harvest Festival (mid-September, Logrono, northern Spain). However, if an all-out wine fight is more your cup of tea (a la the Tomatina tomato fight) you’ll want to go to nearby Haro on June 29 for its Battle of Wine—and from there you can hop over to Pamplona in time (and sufficiently lubricated) for the Running of the Bulls!

In the top wine-growing areas in U.S., the premiere wine events don’t take to the streets, but rather celebrate with embarrassing amounts of quality wine and food. Herewith are the three best:

1. Auction Napa Valley is the crème de la crème of wine events in the U.S., if not the world. Charity is the excuse (this year more than $8 million was raised to support local causes) for a four-day event that includes two winemaker-hosted dinners, an all-day food festival on the lawns of gorgeous Meadowood resort, with music and dancing, and the eye-popping wine auction. Early June, St. Helena (90 minutes north of San Francisco), California.

2. International Pinot Noir Celebration in the heart of Oregon’s wine country, the Willamette Valley, is unique among major U.S. wine events in its focus on a single grape varietal. Compared to the California events, IPNC is considerably smaller in scale, cost, and intensity, with an education component added to the too-much eating and drinking program. End of July, McMinnville (one hour southwest of Portland), Oregon.

3. Sonoma Wine Country Weekend, the poorer cousin to the Napa Valley event, has upped the ante by combining two annual events, Taste of Sonoma and the Sonoma Valley Wine Auction. Still looser and considerably less expensive than Napa, the Sonoma event begins with Friday winery lunches and ends Sunday evening with a charity auction, with some education and the requisite abundance of wine and food in between. First weekend in September, Sonoma County (one hour north of San Francisco), California.