Garlic Festival attendees have a stinkin' good time

Eager to drink, eat, hear local bands and see hundreds of vendors, thousands of people strolled into Rebec Vineyards last weekend for the 21st annual Virginia Wine and Garlic Festival.

It’s an annual, homegrown Central Virginia centerpiece.

Officials said they expected that Saturday’s attendance was a record. They were equally optimistic about Sunday, given that people were bellying up to the wineries’ booths at 10 a.m. sharp, before church even let out and with a Monday holiday for Columbus Day.

With idyllic, sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-70s, total attendance for the two-day event may have surpassed last year’s approximately 21,000 attendees.

It’s a money-maker for Rebec; online tickets were $18 for wine drinkers or $25 at the entrances, which were staffed by dozens of people, including those from the Amherst Rotary Club, to which Rebec makes a donation yearly.

Svet Kanev, Rebec’s winemaker, smiling on his first year at running the festival himself, said the event ran smoothly. “I’m very low in [wine] stock” after the Saturday sales, he said.

Rebec founder Richard Hanson, who now has largely retired, created the event after 20 years of helping run the Sorghum Festival and. He laid out Rebec’s map with a massive festival in mind.

Since it began, it has been a hit.

The festival transcends typical local event attendance patterns, drawing people from throughout the region and well beyond.

A family from Bedford with a toddler in a stroller. A family friend from Charlottesville with Amherst County people. Vendors and winemakers from Amherst and several from Nelson County. Vendors from throughout the region and beyond.

“This is our sixth year,” said Wendy Brown, an employee of Glad Manufacturing Co. in Amherst County, with relatives in tow and a pal from Charlottesville. “It’s a lot of fun, definitely the wine and the entertainment and food are great.”

Vendors’ wares were eclectic. There was Ann Mooney, offering information about acupuncture and health education and message — limp in and leap out, declares Mooney’s business card.

There was the booth with goat kabobs (goat is a staple in Mexico and in many states with a large Latino population). Then there were the Mediterranean and falafel and lamb offerings, crab cakes, Thai food, garlic ice cream, garlic fries, Greek food and another vendor hawking soap products and another selling hats, among dozens of others. Artists and crafts people were abundant.

“We’ve been doing this show for six or seven years,” said Sylvia Camper, of Salem, whose Bavarian-style, cinnamon-flavored nuts drew people with a delectable smell. “Yesterday [Saturday] was awesome.”

Selling eight varieties of cheese and also fresh baguettes, Deanne Marshall of Marshall Farms, a family-owned and operated organic dairy farm in Unionville, was busy with customers who grabbed toothpicks to sample sun-dried tomato cheese, among others.

“Cheese and baguettes go so well with wine,” she said. “People can cleanse their palate, absorb what they’ve had and go on.”

Of course, garlic was plentiful, from the fresh-grown bulbs from Amanda deColigny, owner of S’Amanda’s Natural Mercantile in Faulconerville, to the signature garlic burgers created by Rosemarie De Nova, who hails from a New York Italian family.

Her brother took her to the second garlic festival years ago, and “we’ve been here since,” she said, as New York Yankees-clad chefs grilled her creation.

The festival nowadays has many more food vendors, but the focus has changed, she observed.

“The accent is more on wine,” since she began selling her food from The Garlic Grotto, touted as “makers of the original garlic burgers.” “People aren’t looking for the fine art of cooking with garlic,” she lamented.

Her ground-beef burgers have freshly minced garlic and other herbs, to focus the taste to be smooth and sweet, rather than the sometimes-bitter traditional garlic flavor.

Wine sales this year were regarded as significantly high.

“We reloaded this morning,” said Elizabeth Smith, owner of Afton Mountain Vineyards. Their 2009 vintage was their 20th.

Sales were equally robust at Rebec and at other wineries’ booths, including Hill Top Berry Farm Winery in Nellysford, owned by Greg and Kimberly Pugh, the latter of whom speculated that the Sunday afternoon crowd would swell among people who had the Monday’s Columbus Day holiday off.

October is Virginia Wine Month, and sales statewide are at an all-time high, up 11.4 percent during the fiscal year that ended June 30, according to the Virginia Wine Marketing Office.

Virginia wineries sold 462,112 cases in the 2010-11 fiscal year, up from 414,785 cases.