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A new regional wine and food festival will be run in conjunction with the Fruitloop community fun run at the Matakana Country Park in March.
The Matakana Wine & Food Festival will be a two-day event, on Saturday and Sunday March 5 and 6, featuring local wineries, craft breweries, restaurants, cafes and artisan food producers, plus music and entertainment.
The Matakana Fruitloop will take place on Saturday morning and will include a new ‘mini-loop’ around the perimeter of the park for five to 12 year olds in addition to the traditional trek through orchards and farms.
Both events are being managed and run by Paul Walker, owner/director of a professional conference and events company, Convention Management NZ, who lives at Omaha.
He says he’s keen to bring back Fruitloop, which took a hiatus last year, and combine it with a quality food and wine festival that will promote and showcase the area’s produce on an annual basis. He stresses that, unlike the last attempt to stage a major food and wine festival in Matakana in 2008, the new event is being run ‘by locals for locals’ and will start small.
“I’m going the opposite way to previous events; I don’t have big plans for this year,” he says. “My core business is running self-funding events. I’ve taken time to talk to our producers, the wineries and cafes. I now consider myself a local doing this and that’s being recognised by the companies who are talking with us.
“It’s not about rorting the system, it’s about paying stuff back to the community we live in. We’re doing this to develop everyone’s business and the region as a whole.”
The festival will be promoted as a high-end food and drink experience to encourage families and people who are interested in quality produce, and there will be a zero tolerance approach to excessive alcohol consumption – “the opportunity won’t even be allowed; they’ll just get shown the door”.
Paul has taken over the running of Fruitloop from the Matakana Community Group, and both parties regret that last year’s fun run had to be cancelled when the hand-over didn’t go as swiftly as had been hoped.
However, it’s business as usual for 2016 and all Fruitloop entrants will get the added bonus of free entry to the wine and food festival. But Paul says that the approach to the whole weekend is ‘softly softly’, with the aim of building a lasting event to raise funds for community projects.
“This year’s going to be what it is, and hopefully next year will be bigger – we do want to learn and we want to grow it. We don’t want to crash and burn here,” he says. “It’s about building a self-sustaining event and taking a holistic approach, trying to develop a long-term event that can be recognised as the iconic event in the region.”
Info: paul@cmnzl.co.nz or visit Matakana Wine and Food Festival mwff.co.nz
or Matakana Fruit Loop matakanafruitloop.co.nz
