National Cherry Festival to offer new Global Wine Pavilion

There are fewer master sommeliers on this continent than NFL quarterbacks, and Ron Edwards is one of them, which means he is supremely qualified to use all of those snooty-sounding wine words and some other words that aren't. Like, on the subject of cherry wine, his evaluation is as follows:

"Ghastly, most of the time."

"There are a very few exceptions to that rule," Edwards says. He rates a sparkling cherry wine from St. Julian as "awesome," also from the non-snooty list of wine words. But ghastly being a recurring theme when it comes to cherry wine, you can take it from him that there won't be any in the Global Wine Pavilion at the National Cherry Festival.

Michigan's largest extended summertime celebration runs Saturday through July 11 in Traverse City and features all things cherry: cherry ice cream, cherry T-shirts, the Cherry Queen. Cherry Idol, Cherryopoly, the Very Cherry Distinguished Senior Breakfast. Poke around and you can probably find a cherry muffler for your car.

At the Global Wine Pavilion, however, the cherry will be soundly trumped by the grape. Lots of grapes, in fact: 35 or 40 varietals and blends in close to 100 wines, all personally selected by Edwards.

The Global Wine Pavilion is a first for the Cherry Festival, inspired by the fact that if 500,000 people are attending the air shows, parades, cherry-pit spit and other events, that leaves millions who aren't.

"We're kind of expanding the demographic," says first-year executive director Tim Hinkley. "We've talked to a lot of people who've never come because, quite frankly, there was nothing here they cared about."

Giving what people want

Assuming some of those good folks know the difference between a shiraz and a syrah, and care about it, Edwards has the spot for them. It's a bayside tent on a tree-lined stretch of the defunct Clinch Park Zoo where from 6-10:30 p.m. July 9-11, $10 will buy a Stolzle crystal wine glass and 2 ½ ounces of Edwards' featured nightly selection. Other samples will be available for $3 to $12 each, and appetizers -- cherry content unknown -- will cost another $3.

"They told me they wanted to do something new, and they were thinking they wanted to involve wine," says Edwards, 40, of Charlevoix. "Well, yeah. You're in a wine region."

Broadly speaking, they're also in a depressed region where a reluctance to adapt has less than positive results. Hinkley, who used to run riverboat casinos, couldn't help but notice that.

"The festival has as much competition as any other business," he says, even if it's a nonprofit enterprise. Just in Traverse City, there is a film festival, a minor league baseball team and a horse show that didn't exist five years ago. "People have a choice, so we have to give them what they want."

Wine community bastion

That's where Edwards comes in, although technically, he's giving people what he wants.

If the name sounds familiar, it's because he was a manager and sommelier at Five Lakes Grill in Milford and Tapawingo in Ellsworth. Now he's a wine consultant, jetting off to places like South Africa and Ohio.The pavilion "will be a little bastion of the wine community in the middle of the Cherry Festival," he says. Not wanting to exclude people in the beer community, he's selecting a few unique brews, too.

Of the 24 northern Michigan wineries, 15 will be represented on his wine list. L. Mawby Vineyards of Suttons Bay will have two selections, including Mille, Larry Mawby's best cuvee.

"Everyone else will be angry," predicts Edwards, one of only 100 master sommeliers in North America, "but I needed another sparkling wine." So to use another bit of non-snooty terminology, they can chillax.

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