Livermore Wine Country Festival 2008
The Livermore Wine Country Festival 2008 was held this weekend in downtown Livermore. We attended today.
The event, which began life as the Livermore Wine and Honey Festival, has continued to evolve. This year there were special activities, “play and stay” promotions, live music options (I counted 3 stages with bands, but there could have been more), local history lessons and other educational opportunities at the Livestyle Pavilion, fun activities for the kids, all of the usual downtown shopping and dining options, and sponsoring wineries and breweries. As you can see from the map, the Festival was a big deal!
(Update May 18, 2008: I uploaded higher resolution photos from the Livermore Wine Country Festival today into the “Other Places” album on the Cheshire Cat Photo™ Pro Gallery on Shutterfly™. I also added a photo and some links to low-resolution photos [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] to this blog entry.)
This was the first year in almost 20 years that we “passed” on the wine tasting. I let a Rotary Club volunteer know that we considered ourselves “priced out” by the increase in wine tasting prices this year, which appeared to me to be excessive, and asked her to “bubble up” the message. The cost was $30 for an official Festival wine glass and 20 “drink” tokens (one token for a taste of wine, 5 tokens for a glass of wine/cup of beer). The cost for an official Festival beer cup was $20. The organizers had “bundled” more tokens with the initial purchases, and the Rotary volunteer told us that there had been a number of complaints from people who would rather “pay as they tasted,” rather than “up front.”
In any case, we had a great time looking, shopping, eating “kettle corn,” listening to live music, and taking a few photographs. The weather was comfortable with temperatures in the mid-60s F and with a light-to-moderate breeze. It was warm in the sun, which is pretty much true all year in our part of California. The Festival was a lot of fun, and we will have to see the effect of pricing changes/bundling on the format/bundling/marketing for the event next year. I should have a few photos of the event to embellish this blog entry after post-processing. (Done.)
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™
You can view higher-resolution photos (*generally* 7-30 megabytes, compressed) at the Cheshire Cat Photo™ Pro Gallery on Shutterfly™, where you can also order prints and gifts decorated with the photos of your choice from the gallery. Apparel and other gifts decorated with some of our most popular photos can be ordered from the Cheshire Cat Photo™ Store on CafePress®.
