On a recent trip to the Benicassim Festival in Spain, I purchased a pair of quick-dry camping pants from Titanium for the trip. Walking to outside the festival grounds and sitting on our back-packs whilst waiting for the campsite to open, we took the opportunity to crack a bottle of Rioja we’d got on RENFE (a quick note on RENFE – if you’re on the site and can’t select English you need to select the drop-down labelled Seleccione su Idioma to make it so, which means you have to speak Spanish to get the site into English, go figure!)

Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

Festivals have become huge in the UK – and I guess the States is now picking up. Winemakers have a huge opportunity to sponsor music festivals – because the combination of music, nature, art and alcohol are what festivals are all about. Festivals have re-invented themselves since the days of Woodstock and are a perfect platform for not only entertaining people, but many organisations use them to spread awareness and raise money.

The Green Man Festival coming up next week is one of the most prominent indie festivals – where, much like the Big Chill – and both less commercially than Glastonbury, it promotes organic food, green living, sustainability etc. There’s a huge oppotunity in this concept and I’d really like to see some of the Oregon wineries putting on some music festivals and promoting their wines together with bands from Washington State and around. Many vineyards have acres of land and there’s plenty scope to host festivals on the vineyard grounds themselves. Once millennials cotton onto the benefits of wine and the contribution of viticulturalists to the environment and to local communities – it’ll certainly be the final push needed.

Now that I’ve found a pair of wine-proof pants; and have finally sprung for a decent festival tent whilst having fallen in love with festivals on the first night of Benicassim in a monent of sitting with my wife and two close friends, Will and Anin, drinking Rioja as a pre-game at the campsite with Sigur Ros about to play… I think it’ll be hard to go back to taking normal holidays.

Hopefully next year the Grapethinking team can bring some of the fabulous Tastevine collection to Bonnaroo and some of the other festivals in the US, and one day to the UK – we’ll provide a tent, picnic blankets and a selection of some of the best and most affordable wines from around the world… we’ll leave the music to the musicians though. Don’t forget to bring wine-proof pants…

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