Even while bringing more than 150 wine tasting options under one roof, the organizers behind the Garagiste Wine Festival are more interested in quality over quantity. Luckily for them, finding rare and unadulterated wines comes easy with showcasing micro-production wineries, festival co-founder Douglas Minnick said.
“Wineries at this level of production are not making wines for supermarkets, right? No distributor is interested in repping a winery that makes such a small amount of wine because they just don’t have enough to satisfy their demand. Well, there’s freedom in that,” Minnick explained. “Since you’re not going into supermarkets, you don’t have to make what supermarkets want to put on their shelves. You can do whatever you want, and just find your audience for that.”
Honing in on small wineries specifically gives the Garagiste Wine Festival a unique edge over other wine tasting conventions, added Minnick, who co-founded the multi-city event with Stewart McLennan in 2011.
“Most other wine festivals are either based around a variety or a region. Our organizing principle is: small. It’s just that you have to be small. And what that means is we have the widest range of grapes and wines,” Minnick said.
“We’ve done 26 of these festivals, and I am still learning about grapes that I have never heard of before. It is the absolute best place to discover new wines, new winemakers, new varieties—the range is huge.”
The California-based festival is held annually in Solvang, Los Angeles, Sonoma, and Paso Robles, where it originated more than a decade ago.
“We wanted to shine a spotlight on all these micro wineries that were popping up all around Paso and Santa Barbara … but most of them didn’t have tasting rooms. They were hard to find,” Minnick said. “Tin City [in Paso Robles] is now kind of the permanent installation of the Garagiste Festival, in a way, in that 75 or 80 percent of the wineries in Tin City started by pouring at the Garagiste Fest when they didn’t have a tasting room.”
Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the last festival to be held in Solvang was scheduled for the spring of 2020. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
Now for the first time since 2019, the Garagiste Wine Festival is returning to Solvang’s historic Veterans’ Memorial Hall, where more than 30 small production wineries from throughout the Central Coast and other California regions will be showcased.
The list of featured vintners include Ann Albert Wines, Bolt To Wines, Camins 2 Dreams, Crazy Woman Cellars, Demeter Family Cellars, Dreamcote Wine Co., Lions Peak Winery, Montemar Wines, Purple Dragon Cellars, Sweetzer Cellars, and more. Solvang’s iteration of the festival has tasting events scheduled for Friday, Feb. 25, and Saturday, Feb. 26.
Minnick described the atmosphere of the festival as lively, fun, and relaxed, thanks to the event’s unofficial “no snobs allowed” policy, he explained.
“Winemakers are the least snobby people in the world. There’s none of that sommelier kind of attitude amongst the winemakers themselves,” Minnick said. “We wanted to make sure that people got that sense of it, that it’s really informal and fun.”
In an effort to promote a more open flow and ample room for social distancing within the Solvang event’s indoor venue, some of the event’s usual yearly programming has been altered or omitted, including the festival’s VIP seminar, which will not be held this year.
While the festival sells out every year, Minnick said there’s a capacity limit put in place not only due to pandemic protocols, but also to ensure an intimate one-on-one experience between visitors and the featured winemakers, who pour their own wines themselves during the tastings.
“It’s busy but not overcrowded. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a busy room. It’s busy and fun and loud and so forth. But it’s not overcrowded, and it’s not uncomfortable in any way,” Minnick said. “We limit our ticket sales so that it’s based on a ratio of how many wineries are pouring, how many people are in the room, so that you actually have the chance to talk to the winemakers and they to you, that’s a big part of what we do.
“The winemakers always tell us it’s their favorite crowd to pour for.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood wants you to crowd his inbox at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 10-17, 2022.