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Wine: Outside LandsOutside Lands Festival in San Francisco features quality wines as well as musicby Steve Palopoli on Aug 12, 2010
WITH THE THIRD year of the Outside Lands Festival going down this weekend, the biggest buzz is about the musical lineup: Kings of Leon, Further, the Strokes, Phoenix, Social Distortion, Cat Power and on and on down the bill. That makes sense; Outside Lands has made its name as a music event, but there’s a huge part of the festival that delivers a much more literal buzz and yet has gone mostly under the cultural radar, and that’s the wine. Even the first year, when not staking out a spot among the other 79,999 people converging in Golden Gate Park to see Radiohead, I was over in the wine glen or wine den, or whatever it was called then, raising several glasses of California’s finest wines. I remember the feeling that I imagined was being shared by the dozens of people around me who had also just discovered they weren’t going to have to drink crappy chardonnay out of a plastic cup: Wow, somebody putting on a music festival in California finally got it. Since then, the wine aspect has developed far beyond even that, to the point that it now has its own major area of the festival, dubbed “Wine Lands.” With more than two dozen vineyards on hand, as well as an even larger culinary lineup that makes up “A Taste of the Bay Area,” it’s easy to see why Outside Lands represents a new, cutting-edge philosophy and strategy for music festivals in the 21st century, one that festival organizer Rick Ferman, a co-founder of Superfly Presents, describes as “holistic.” “There’s a lot of cross-pollination,” he says. “We truly believe there’s a deep connection between the culinary scene and the music.” In some ways, it was the locale that pushed the people behind Outside Lands to put their emphasis on a sensory blend. “Maybe in some other cities you don’t need to do all of that stuff,” says Ferman, himself a Bay Area resident. “But to us it was kind of obvious, based on the history and the scene. We produced an event that I think spoke to the needs of this audience.” This year, they’ve added even more interplay between the music and the wine, encouraging artists to come to on-site tastings during the festival. “You just get better at doing pretty much everything,” Ferman says of the difference between putting together this year and the previous two. Wines from this area have a major presence at Outside Lands; in fact, the two top-billed wineries are Cupertino’s Ridge Vineyards, and Santa Cruz’s Bonny Doon label. Napa is of course well-represented with Robert Sinskey, Hess Collection, Pine Ridge, Silverado and more, while other participants like Sebastopol’s Iron Horse and Yolo County’s Berryessa Gap are all over the map. Other music festivals had better take notice: cheap cab in a plastic cup is no longer going to cut it. by Steve Palopoli on Aug 12, 2010 |
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