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By Morton Hochstein
St. Michaels Food and Wine Festival
I went to a mahrr-vel-ous party. In his brilliant song, Noel Coward expressed my feelings about the St. Michaels Food and Wine Festival on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, which I enjoyed in late April. It’s one of many great wine and food gatherings I’ve been fortunate to attend — among them the Aspen Food and Wine Classic, Napa Valley Wine Auction, the International Pinot Noir Celebration in Oregon, and The Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival in Austin.
Those first two, Aspen and Napa, are awash in wealthy patrons in tuxedos and gowns, glamorous dinners at wineries attended by guests flying in on private jets. As playgrounds for the rich, they raise tremendous amounts of money. The Napa Valley Wine Auction, for instance, was able to give $8.8 million to 47 charitable and nonprofit programs after last year’s auction and has pledged a minimum of $5 million annually in donations for the next four years. Like Napa, Aspen supports a number of charities, including a unique program to encourage locally and sustainably grown foods in low-income communities and at colleges and universities.
But Napa and Aspen draw thousands of people over almost a week of partying. The Austin and Chesapeake Bay festivals are more concentrated, three full days of events from Friday through Sunday with advance partying on Thursdays for VIP’s, trade and press. The Hill Country weekend in Austin drew a shade under 10,000 people, the largest number being 4,000 people who paid $50 for a Sunday afternoon of tasting and sipping in a nearby park. It’s a nonprofit program and barely yields enough to cover operating expenses. However, the swells turned out in tux and gown Saturday for the Texas Wine and Food Foundation auction, which raised $370,000 to be allotted to the local public service television channel and grants and scholarships in food research.
The auction in Austin started with an all-you-can eat buffet of haute cuisine, rapidly morphing into an evening of bidding and showmanship. Two lots drew top dollars. The first was a six-bottle batch of premier cru 1988 Bordeaux, including La Mission Haut Brion, Lynch Bages and Pichon – Longueville, which nearly tripled its estimated value of $1,300, selling for $3,600. The other big number came when a dozen top-rated Italian wines - Gaja Barbaresco, Banfi Sant’ Antimo Summus and Feudi San Gregorio Serpico in the batch-- sold for $2,600, more than double their estimated value of $1,200.
Texas was fun, but my vote goes to Chesapeake Bay. It’s reasonable driving distance from Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore and my home in New York and I’ve taken long weekends there several times. I like St. Michaels and other hamlets along the peninsula. The towns are small and rich in history and their old houses and stores are very Cape Cod and Hamptons in feel. And where else do you find a cuisine so rich in oysters and crabs, and fresh fish?
The festival is very mom-and-pop. It was totally volunteer-staffed by locals from its start in 2003 until this year when it hired a local restaurateur, Jon Mason as executive director. In ’08, the festival drew about the same attendance as the previous year, around 2,300 people, but that figure would have much higher if the sunny skies that brought crowds out on Friday and Saturday had not turned dark, cold and damp on Sunday. Overall, said marketing coordinator Bonnie Booth, “we were quite happy with results,” and well she should be.
The little festival that could, which is how I like to think of a small volunteer group putting on such a good show, raised about $30,000 for local endeavors, including The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, the St. Michaels Food Bank, The Chesapeake Culinary Center, Pickering Creek Audubon Center, and Fresh Farm Markets, which supports market programs in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
There’s a Yiddish phrase, haimish, which I would apply to the St. Michaels event. The term might be totally foreign to the Chesapeake Bay crowd, but New Yorkers might recognize it as meaning comfortable and homey, and that’s how it felt during the weekend. Almost everyone among the 50 volunteers knew each other, knew the wine reps and craftspeople and entrepreneurs manning the stands and knew many of the visitors who paid a $65 entrance fee to attend tastings and seminars and cooking demonstrations.
Haimish is executive director Mason rushing from tent to tent, making announcements, carrying literature and supplies from booth to booth, taping down microphone cords, ferrying guests from festival grounds to nearby inns and restaurants, and going with little sleep for the days before and the duration of the fair. Haimish is wine importer Bobby Kacher jumping out of a crowd during the auction for a dinner prize sponsored by his friend Washington restaurateur Michel Richard, and volunteering to serve as personal sommelier to the high bidders.
Small it may be, —in comparison to Napa and Aspen— but the festival is not without its celebrities. Tony May, the famed host of San Domenico and godfather to Italian culinary education here and in Italy came down from New York to speak, as did Lou Di Paolo, a frequent guest expert on TV food programs, whose cheese and food shop in Little Italy is a must for New York gourmets. In addition to May and Richard, the restaurant luminary roster also included John Doherty, executive chef at the Waldorf-Astoria and Jeffrey Buben, exec chef and owner of Vidalia’s and Bistro Bis in Washington, D.C. Kacher and Margo Van Staaveren, winemaker at Chateau St. Jean winery in Napa, were among the luminaries conducting wine seminars.
And that minimal entrance fee, in comparison to the charges at more celebrated festivals, can be a terrific bargain. There were several wine tastings, but the all-time winner anywhere for me was conducted by Kacher, who is a summer resident of the region. Kacher dug into a rich cellar for an animated and informative seminar on The Evolution of Burgundy, serving up a pair of extraordinary whites and equally prestigious reds. His audience of about 80 wine devotees tasted 2005 Meursault Les Charmes Old Vines Domaine Xavier Monnot (65 years old vines); 2005 Chassagne Montrachet Les Caillerets Marc Morey; 2005 Beaune Cent Vignes Domaine Albert Morot (Planted in 1959); and 2005 Gevrey Chambertin Vieilles Vignes Domaine Christian Serafin (60 years old vines).
At retail, if you could find them, those beauties would run $80 to $100 each, probably even more, hardly the level of wines normally served at wine seminars. The tasting alone was worth the price of admission.
Many Washington luminaries spend weekends and summer breaks along Chesapeake Bay and Noel Coward might well have found several “mahrr-vel-ous parties’ at private homes that weekend. I enjoyed mine on the grounds of the festival.
© June 2008 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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