Pip's Plate

The Twin Cities Fresh Taste Festival is a community event that features organic and sustainable food & wine.

Sunday, August 17, 11 am – 5 pm

Nicollet Island Pavillion (40 Power Street, Minneapolis, MN see map)

From the Twin Cities Fresh Taste Festival site:

Join us at the inaugural Twin Cities Fresh Taste Festival, a day-long event to celebrate the best in organic, local and sustainable food products and wines.

Set on the beautiful picturesque banks of the Mississippi River at the Nicollet Island Pavilion, the festival will be filled with organic food and beverage vendors – from many outstanding local restaurants and food producers. Sample from 100 organic wines from national and international wineries. Plus, learn from local chefs as they prepare some of their best signature organic dishes.

Tickets:

$55 before day-of

$65 at the door

NOTE: you can receive $3.00 off a ticket with your Minnesota Public Radio Member Connect Card

Minnesota has been trying to pass a law that would all grocery stores to sell wine and beer. (Currently Minnesota has an asinine law that grocery stores can only sell 3.2% beer.) Wine With Dinner has not quite made it through legislation, but on a recent trip to Chicago, IL, I discovered something at Whole Foods that completely blew my mind.

Wine tasting in the grocery store! Check this out (sorry for the blurry pic):

You put money in (somewhere – I didn’t look for it), and you can select which wine you’d like to try. Whole Foods provides real wine glasses (ain’t no plastic waste in Whole Foods), and they display the price for a 1 oz. pour. I think there are about 12-15 wines at this kiosk.

Pretty cool. I was tempted to try some, but after all the karaoke singing the night before, I didn’t think 1pm on a Sunday was a good idea.

Even though I visited Healdsburg, CA, almost 3 months ago, I’m still very inspired from that trip. It was one of the best trips I’ve been on.

The pictures are always hilarious after several wine tastings. I’m pretty sure this was what was happening as we raced to Stryker at 4:58pm. Thankfully I wasn’t driving. And we did make it; which was great because I discovered that I actually love syrah. I think that wine was one of the best ones we had the whole week.

Either way, this picture pretty much sums up the experience of wine tasting on River Road in Russian River Valley: