Here's something to get excited about if you love food and wine. And who doesn't? Make sure you save the date in your diary. Be sure to keep this whole weekend free. And make Rootstock Sydney, the leading wine and food festival in Australia with a message, your education and entertainment priority.
The focus of Not For Profit organization and event Rootstock Sydney is to promote sustainable farming in food and wine production and little/no additions in winemaking.
The first Rootstock Sydney gathered a flock of 3,500 wine and food lovers for Australia’s first celebration of natural wine and artisan produce. In 2014 Rootstock Sydney moved to its current home Carriageworks and hosted 13,500 people for Australia’s largest food, wine and arts event of its kind. In 2015 the program expanded and welcomed even more winemakers, farmers, chefs and producers and included one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander installations on indigenous produce and farming.
We chatted with Mike Bennie about what the weekend of November 26th and 27th has in store for us this year.
Drinks
We’re really pleased to again showcase an incredible spectrum of food, produce, wines, beers and spirits, all with a focus on sustainable farming and artisan production.
This year our wine sessions will again be full of charismatic winemakers with locals alongside luminaries of international natural wine. New additions include a contingency from Georgia, showing some of the incredible, ancient winemaking culture and traditions, and for the first time a producer from famed French wine region, Jura. We’ve got a number of new producers attending, alongside some favourites who have been loyal to the Rootstock Sydney festival.
Coupled to this is our infamous night parties, with naturally fermented beer, sake, and orange wine bars, once again helping out punters wining, dining and dancing the night away.
This year we have enhanced our focus in the wine sessions on organic and natural farming, with all wines either produced from certified organic/biodynamic grapes, or grown naturally to Australian organic ‘standards’. This, alongside the minimal intervention winemaking practice of our winemakers attending, will showcase some truly wonderful, unique, delicious wines."
Food
The food program again shifts in 2016 with a collaboration with Carriageworks Farmers Markets over both days of the festival. Sunday is a one-off, bespoke special event In the spirit of Australian native food we are putting together another epic chefs collaborative party on Sunday night. David Moyle, Duncan Welgemoed, Aaron Turner and Pasi Petenan will cook a storm grilling sting rays and underground cooked kangaroo tails"
Pasi Petenan will host a talk about bread making, from flour to fermentation to woodfired cooking.
Kylie Kwong will be at the Sunday market preparing a special Rootstock Sydney dish for her stall offer.
In collaboration with Carriageworks, Rootstock will launch a special edition of the Carriageworks Farmers Market running from 11 am to 4pm focused on native ingredients and ethnic-Australian foods.
Expect an amazing street food market, where you will be able to nibble from kangaroo, wallaby, crocodile, native bees honey, bunya nuts, to bull boar sausage a specialty from the Italian speaking Swiss population of the Victorian Gold Fields since the 1850s.
