A wet winter transformed into a bright and warm spring this weekend, with blue skies and warm air, as residents of the Verde Valley and beyond gathered at the community field in downtown Camp Verde for the annual Spring Heritage Pecan & Wine Festival.
No one could have asked for a more perfect day for the event, but previous weather put something of a damper on the proceedings. Normally, the festival is accompanied by the Verde River Runoff, an opportunity for boating on the Verde River, but this year heavy water flow and river debris forced organizers to cancel the event.
Nevertheless, the land- based portion of the celebrations continued on, with the whole field filled with vendors, tents and mobs of people. Four musical acts performed onstage and a pecan pie contest was held Sunday morning, giving all those in attendance a chance to try the best of the nuts grown in the area.
“It’s an opportunity to get together, to communicate with the public and for sales,” Frank Geminden of Windmill Garden farms, who was selling pecans at the event, said. Geminden has been selling pecans at the festival for nearly twenty years and had several ribbons hanging from his tent, signifying awards his nuts had won in years past when pecans were judged.
“Camp Verde used to be more of an agricultural community,” Geminden said. “It’s called Verde because it’s green and it’s green because it’s irrigated. The community needs to understand the importance of agriculture in Camp Verde, whether they plant or not.”
“I do want to work with the local farmers around here,” Maribel Garrabrant said. She is a bakery owner from Cottonwood who was selling pecan brownies, pecan puffs and spiced pecans at the event. “Pecans are so versatile. You can use them sweet, you can use them salty, you can even use them as nut flour for gluten free.”
In addition to the pecans, the festival showed off 19 vineyards from around the Verde Valley and Northern Arizona, an increase from 13 last year.
“Camp Verde Promotions invited local vineyards before through a wine consortium,” Nikki Miller, the lead organizer for the event, said. “This year, we opened it up to everyone. Whether that makes them more profitable or less prof- itable from more competition, I don’t know.”
“This is the only wine event that we come to,” George Peterkin, an employee of Clear Creek Vineyards, one of two winemakers located in Camp Verde at the festival, said. “People are more serious about the wines here. And this is where we are. We’re in Camp Verde, not Sedona, not Cottonwood. This is our backyard.”
According to Peterkin, Clear Creek takes advantage of numerous aspects of Camp Verde’s landscape in making its wine. The lime- stone and gypsum in the area makes the soil similar to the Bordeaux region in France and allows for planting of similar grape varietals. And, by taking water from Clear Creek, which flows from snow melt on the Mogollon Rim, not groundwater, they are able to make less acidic wine than many other Arizona wines.
Numerous winemakers at the festival touted efforts to have the Verde Valley designated as an American Viticultural Area by the federal government, which would make it one of just three in the state of Arizona.
“When you have smaller, local vineyards, it’s about the place,” Chip Norton, who co-founded Salt Mine Wine in Camp Verde with his brother Kevin this past year, said. “We’re nestled next to a pecan grove, and two parcels down is a you-pick-em tomato stand. That’s a unique thing in Arizona, to have a small area with a lot of agriculture.”
Jon Hecht can be reached at 282-7795 or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
