Winefest

Saturday was the Winefest. It is one of my most favorite weekends here. CAVE, Colorado Association of Vinticulture & Enology*, puts on the 4 day event. But really the main event is the Winefest at Riverbend park. CAVE used to be called RMAVV which stood for Rocky Mountain Association of Vinters and Vinticulturists, so I guess CAVE is much catchier. They're catchin' on. And that's what I like about the Winefest. It is the one event I've seen in Palisade that gets it. It gets that people want to eat good food while drinking wine. It gets that there should be music playing while people are mingling about. It gets that you should sell wine related things. The only thing it doesn't get is that you shouldn't close at 5 pm and there's no Winefest park event on Sunday. 5 pm?! Things are just starting to rock at 5 pm. That's that 'sweet' small town attitude (that drives me insane).

Anyway, there were about 7000 people that attended and there were 53 wineries. All of the wineries were from Colorado, if you can believe it. There were all kinds like this jovial red wine glass wearing broad (no, that's not me but could be next year.) When you first go into the show you get my favorite thing. No not wine, that's later. You get the 6 bottle carrying bag. That is a great idea. I always feel the need to fill it up. This year they even added a center slot for non-wine things. Jeez, why waste the space is what I say. Anyway, you also get this commerative Winefest tasting glass. With that glass, I can pretty much go anywhere. Ok, let's go.

Kenny and I's mission is two-fold. First, to drink a lot of good wine. Duh. Second, to find buyers for our grapes next year. We have only one rule- we have to like their wine. If we don't like the wine, we don't want them using our grapes to make crappy wine. If we did that, we'd probably have these bottles of wine we'd be pouring for friends, explaining the whole time how 'if you hold your breath and take a swig of gin right after, you'd swear it was an expensive Malbec from Argentina." No thank you.


So we're in cognito....drinking wines (has to be tasty), scoping out the label (has to be a good label), checking out location (Front Range is better, more people...with money), and the pricing of their bottles. Why does that matter, you ask? Because if they can get a higher price per bottle then hopefully, they can pay a higher price per ton, silly. Get it?


By 2 o'clock we were all starving and the Balastreri Winery had the ticket. For $20 you get a baguette, a block of parmesan, a chunk of salami, a wine opener, a mini-cleaver, and some fruit. All the winery booths should sell something like that, they'd make a killing. Full of wine food, we wander our way down to the last row. We tried most of the wines out of the 53. You get just a little taste but 53 tastes, let alone the multiple tastes per grape varietal that each winery carries, can make you a little woozy. By the time I got to the last row, all the wines tasted tangy. That's not good. With the first lucky bastard I thought 'ooh what an aroma, nice body, good finish'. The poor last sucker I stated, 'this is tangy, I can't taste anything else.' Even with water in between, my taste buds were shot.


At the end of our tasting debaucle, I pull up all my wine notes and we all split up to make our purchases. Tomorrow, I'll tell you a bit about some of the wines we thought were up to snuff.


Remember imbibe and enjoy!




* Enology is the study of wine making