Old Town Spring Autumn Art & Texas Wine Festival

http://www.winefesttexas.com

Old Town Spring has a few festivals during the year and earlier this year they held their annual SpringFest, a Wine & Art Festival. This year they held their first Autumn Art & Texas Wine Festival on October 15th and 16th.

Since we volunteered at SpringFest and also recently at another wine festival, we offered our services to help some Texas wineries pour wine. The shift we were assigned to work was the last shift on Saturday. Volunteers were to receive a volunteer t-shirt along with a wine glass and 5 tasting tickets, just like festival-goers would receive (minus the t-shirt). Because our shift was last and they would be closing, we decided to arrive early at the festival to enjoy our wine tastings before our shift started.

We checked in at the volunteer booth and got our t-shirt with the wine glass and tickets. The wine tent was set up in the middle of the festival and represented 10 different Texas wineries. We only saw one person wearing a volunteer t-shirt so we thought there was no need for volunteering. After getting in touch with the organizers, they confirmed there were volunteers but they didn’t want to change into their t-shirt. Great, we could still help.

Arts and craft booths were set up around the wine tent and we spent time looking at them, before we bypassed the beer stand (this blog is not the TX Beer Lover) and went straight to the wine tent. Familiar faces were seen and we started using our wine tickets to sample wines we haven’t had in a while or had at all. Local wineries were present including even Chisholm Trail Winery coming all the way from Fredericksburg and Fall Creek from Tow. It was a good sampling of wineries and wines as each winery brought two to four wines for people to sample.

As is the usual case, we used up our tickets quickly and were ready to start our shift early. We were placed at the table which had four Messina Hof and two Wimberley Valley wines. Four of the five were sweet wines and one red was a dry so we were able to accommodate anybody who came by.

There was a steady stream of people through the rest of the day doing their tastings. During one brief rest, we talked with the organizers of the festival about the future of the festival. They will also be holding a Spring festival in addition to continuing the Autumn one next year too. They are planning on the next festival being even bigger with more wineries. Woo hoo!

The organizers were very nice and we already put in our request to volunteer again at the next one. It is always a fun time volunteering to pour wine, and we highly recommend for anybody to do so if you get the chance. One piece of advice that helps is to get TABC (Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission) Certification. It is a two hour online course that a few websites offer. Once you get that certification, you are able to work at restaurants and bars serving liquor. Not all festivals require the TABC Certification but it certainly does not hurt to have it. The certification is good for two years.

Overall, we had another great time volunteering at a wine festival. See you at the next one!