Carytown Food & Wine Festival.

Interesting little wine festival in Carytown, a neighborhood/shopping district in Richmond, the weekend before last. Closed down the street and put up tents along a five- or six-block length. For a first-time event, they did a pretty good job.

Among the highlights:
Wine and beer tasting seminars on a variety of topics. The wine seminars generally dealt with specific regions (Germany, Italy, Spanish reds) while the beer seminars generally dealt with specific breweries (Legend, Smuttynose, Starr Hill). And for each, your entry fee got you a glass tasting glass.
A wine tasting tent with ten tasting stations and probably fifty wines, and a glass tasting glass. Half of the stations were manned by importer/distributors, representing France, Italy, Australia, and a couple of stations from all over, and the other five were each devoted to wines from a single winery. I appreciated the variety of wines available, and thought the best wines were at the Storybrook Mountain Vineyards station (all zinfandels) and the Mondavi station.

And areas for improvement:
Better floorplan for moving people through the wine tasting tent. I recognize they had severe limitations on the size of tent they could use, but there were bottlenecks that made it take over two hours to go through all the tasting stations, and most of that time was waiting to get through the crowd.
Better involvement from Carytown stores. While many stores were open, taking advantage of the crowds that showed up, a surprising number were closed. And the beer and wine events appear to have been planned and supported by only River City Cellars, as Carytown Wine & Beer declined to assist. (And you know they were hurting for assistance: they even asked me to conduct a beer seminar. Unfortunately, the only seminars they needed someone for were Belgian beers and homebrewing, either of which I could talk about for ten minutes, but not for thirty. So I had to decline.)
Better takeaway information. The wine tasting tent had a great selection of wines to try - but no information about those wines that you could take home with you, or take with you to the store when you wanted to buy any of those wines. There should have been either a single list of all the wines being tasted (or, to be realistic, that they expected the distributors to have available for tasting, as of noon on the day before the festival), or each station should have had a list of the wines being tasted at it - and this shorter list could have more description of the wines. Ideally, both types of lists should have been available - and neither one was. I can sympathise with the festival organizers and am certain they had more important things to worry about (such as whether the distributors were going to show up - near as I could tell, at least one did not). But the distributors and wineries involved had no similar reason to fail to have such information available - and only Stonybrook Mountain Vineyards had flyers listing all the wines you were trying. All the other folks could do was to point at the nearby wine shop and say that you could get it in there.

All told, this festival was a lot of fun, and you can forgive first-time errors. Putting on a festival like this has a steep learning curve, and I'm sure next year's will be even better.