Taste buds' treat in Geneva
Tri-colored garlic crab pasta? Four tickets.
Chocolate crème brulee tart? Four tickets.
Enjoying samples of what Geneva restaurants have to offer and washing them down with glasses of great wines on a crisp, clear day?
This is the life.
The annual Festival of the Vine began Friday; it continues today and Sunday. And while merchants throughout downtown Geneva offered wine tastings, special sales and other activities, the Flavor Fare tent was the place to taste Friday.
"My son said 'I'll have lunch with you.' I said 'I'll run over to the taste,'" said Carol Jacklin, who lives a few blocks away and was loading up a cardboard box top with goodies. An adult son was in town for a business meeting Friday morning.
"I just get all my meals here all weekend," Jacklin said.
As usual, people were lined up at Chianti's Carryout and Catering to get the signature pasta dish and Cajun chicken tortellini. A friend of the owner, Joseph Stanton, was volunteering at the booth. Chianti's has been at the festival almost every year since it began in 1981, missing it only when Ristorante Chianti closed. A few employees opened the carryout business.
"When we were gone those two years, people were looking for us," Stanton said.
Sixteen restaurants and two shops sell their wares. Each ticket costs $1. Food is one to four tickets, and wines are mostly three to seven tickets, although there is one -- Chateau St. Jean Cinq Cepages -- that is 10 tickets.
It probably wasn't made by people stomping grapes in a vat.
But the festival did offer that opportunity Friday night, and will again at 5 p.m. today.
"Oh, is it cold," said Mary Elliott of Batavia, one of the first to step into a small vat. She danced around for maybe a minute, then stepped out and planted her size 8s onto a souvenir white T-shirt that said "I stomped at Festival of the Vine."
How does it feel to have grapes between your toes? "It was delightfully gushy," she said.
The festival resumes today. There are games for children on the courthouse lawn on Third Street (including vegetable bowling), an arts and crafts sale, a sidewalk art event at the Geneva Public Library, a history walk at the cemetery at Third and North streets, and the Geneva Academic Foundation's "Mighty Viking" fundraiser at Wheeler Park. For details, see the Three-Day Planner in Neighbor.
If you go
What: Festival of the Vine
Where: Downtown Geneva
When: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. today and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday
Info: genevachamber.com