Dozens of wine festivals take place throughout the Bay Area every year, and they’re largely all the same.
They typically go like this: Wine lovers coalesce under big white tents, in barrel rooms or in sterile event spaces, and carry a glass from one table to the next until their teeth are purple. Sometimes they’ll get a pour directly from a winemaker, but more often, it’s a sales or marketing employee with a spiel and a wine club sign-up form. There’s usually a charcuterie table; at the really expensive ones, you might find oysters and caviar, along with auxiliary dinners and parties that cost a few hundred bucks each.
Like wine clubs, festivals are overdue for a shakeup, especially if wineries want to engage younger generations; I’d wager that the average age of attendees is somewhere around 50. A new Bay Area festival — Hella Chenin in Berkeley — is one of a handful of events doing things differently, starting with its neon branding and fun, millennial-coded name that nods to Bay Area culture. A celebration of one of California’s most trendy grapes, Chenin Blanc, the festival launched last year. It sold out, with 450 attendees who “very heavily skewed millennial and Gen Z,” said co-founder Peter Andrews, who also founded Culture Wine Co., which imports South African wine to the U.S…