The sixth annual Verde Valley Wine Festival will return to Riverfront Park in Cottonwood on Saturday, May 11, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The festival celebrates local wineries and growers and will feature over 20 wineries from across the state as well as additional vendors.
Attendees can listen to live music throughout the day. What’s the Big Idea will be headlining and S.E. Willis featuring Sweet Baby Ray and Well Dressed Wolves will also be performing. Food trucks will be on site and beverage choices will include beer, kombucha and non-alcoholic drinks. The festival is hosted by the Verde Valley Wine Consortium and the city of Cottonwood.
“We’re blooming, blossoming and growing here in the Verde Valley,” festival organizer and president of the Verde Valley Wine Consortium Paula Woolsey said about the region’s wine scene.
The VVWC is a trade organization that has been representing all the wineries in the Verde Valley since 2008.
“I came by it naturally,” Woolsey said of her work with wine. Woolsey is also on the board for the Verde Valley Wine Trail and has taught in Yavapai College’s viticulture department for the past 15 years. She explained that the local wine scene in the region really started in 1984.
“Like most of the people that are currently in the wine scene or who started it, we moved here because we wanted to live here first and then we actively created an industry in the Verde Valley,” Woolsey said.
“It used to be about a decade ago that people would come to see Sedona or Jerome and they’d stumble into the fact we had a wine region,” she said. “Now people are coming because we have a wine region.”
This year’s festival will include a wine pull in memory of Mitch Levy, one of VVWC’s board members who recently died, to raise money for the Cottonwood Public Library’s children’s library. The wine pull allows participants to pay a price for a mystery bottle of wine, pick a number and receive a bag with a bottle of wine in it.
“We’re treating everybody like a VIP,” said Woolsey about this year’s festival. In previous years, VIP tickets were available at higher prices but this year’s festival only has general admission for the one day event.
This year’s event also has different genres of music which in previous years had primarily been jazzy.
“We try to keep it a little bit different every year,” said Woolsey. She added that by hosting it at Riverfront Park they don’t exclude families with children as they can enjoy the park as well.
There will be wine associated items available for sale, such as furniture made out of wine barrels, among other art and craft vendors.
“Not unlike wine growing in Arizona, Old Town Cottonwood is on fire,” said Maynard James Keenan, festival creator, in a press release. “So many world-class wines in one beautiful location. So many new producers and restaurants to discover…”
For more information, visit verdevalleywinefestival.com.
