Harvest Fest

Saturday October 9th, 2010 | Arts @ the Armory | Tickets start at just $20

Harvest Fest is Somerville Local First’s annual fall fundraiser and celebration. Held at Arts @ The Armory, Harvest Fest brings all things cool and local: beer, wine, music, art, fashion and food for one of the best parties of the year. Needless to say, we do the ‘nonprofit gala’ thing a little bit differently.

Harvest Fest 2010 will almost certainly sell out well in advance. After all, tickets are only $20 and you get a ton of value while helping provide much needed capital for SLF to continue its work in the community.

No need to Whine, The Second Glass Has You Covered

One of the improvements at Harvest Fest 2010 that we’re really excited about is our enhanced Local Wines presence. This year, The Second Glass, your unpretentious, badass source for baller wine information, will be sampling wine from Massachusetts and Cider from New Hampshire. And this is no Proximity over Quality choice either.

President and Co-Founder of The Second Glass, Tyler Balliet says:

“Every single state in the US now makes wine and there are some really good vineyards in some surprising places. Here in New England we have some totally kickass wineries making fantastic wine! Dollar for dollar, the wines you’ll taste at Harvest Fest 2010 are good enough to compare with anything France or California can offer.”

The Second Glass to bring their love of local wine and penchant for partying to Harvest Fest 2010

So with no further ado, here’s what’s in-store for the wine booth at Harvest Fest 2010:

Wesport Rivers

A family owned winery in Westport MA specializes in sparkling wines that rival those from all over the globe. They also make a variety of still wines that are crisp, delicious and reflect the New England lands on which they were grown. It started with Bob and Caroll Russel who bought an old dairy farm and built a winery, their sons Rob and Bill carry on the tradition to this day with an array of wines that are both local and delicious!

Farnum Hill Wines

A small apple orchard in MA that specializes in rare apple species made for cider, cooking and eating. Planted on an old dairy farm their ciders are refreshing, made from all MA apples and fermented on site!

Travessia Winery

Marco Montez is the man behind the wine, using all local produce they create a variety of well crafted white wines (and a rose!). Marco hopes to one day own his own land, that he might himself grow the grapes somewhere in Southeastern New England. “In a very short period of time I’ve learned that winemaking presents tremendous risks and enormous challenges. It’s farming, it’s chemistry, it’s marketing, it’s sales… And I’ve only scratched the surface. But the world of wine and winemaking is also extremely exciting and rewarding in its own unique way.”

90+ Cellars

90+ is taking advantage of the current economic conditions by purchasing high quality and highly rated finished wines direct from wineries at a discount and then passing the savings on to you. Price and availability aren’t the only selection criteria. The wines we purchase must have a pedigree of 90 or higher ratings, best buy or gold medal accolades from a respected wine authority or publication meaning 90+ sells high quality wine to you at a discount.

Tickets are starting to move fast, get yours today before you miss out on all the local love!

(Editors Note: This story originally referenced ”ALL Massachusetts wine”. We have updated the post to more accurately reflect our tasting, which will be from all Massachusetts wine companies, but not all produced within Massachusetts. We’ve also added a clarification that Farnum Hills Cider is from New Hampshire. We’re the first ones to call out others for mis-representing local, so we made these corrections as soon as they were brought to our attention.)

Originally posted on...September 1st, 2010
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Harvest Fest: The Second Glass In The House & Local Designer/DJ to Manage Fashion Performance

by Joe Grafton

We’re just over two months away from Harvest Fest 2010 and the participant list continues to add some of the best and brightest from Greater Boston. One thing we’ve learned in our 2+ year history: The more great people we can surround ourselves with, the more fun and success we have. Along those lines, we are incredibly excited to announce two new partners for this years festivities. Note: We do expect the event to sell out, and suggest you buy your tickets in advance.

The Second Glass to bring their love of local wine and penchant for partying to Harvest Fest 2010 and their own Wine Riot on October 22nd & 23rd.

“The Second Glass is your unpretentious, badass source for baller wine information.” Sounds like a match made in heaven, and we think it will be. Tyler and Morgan, the founders of SG were recently featured in Inc Magazine’s 30 under 30, a list of some of the country’s best young entrepreneurs and have lots of local roots and connections.

It is also worth thanking the recent hot and sweltering weather for facilitating this bad-ass partnership. For were it not for Tyler’s need to get out of his hot apartment and into an air conditioned office, and my response via the social interwebs that he was welcome to chill (pun intended) at the SLF office for the day, we might not be talking about this. But a short conversation later, Tyler was emailing Morgan about the potential of running the local wine parade at Harvest Fest, and a day later it was official (entrepreneurs, social or otherwise, like to act quickly).

Finally, it’s not just about these guys rocking our wine world. Remember, Harvest Fest is about local first and foremost. And Tyler is excited to show our guests just what Massachusetts can do. In discussing the format, Tyler said “Massachusetts wineries are making GREAT wine right now. But not enough people know this“. We have a feeling that at least 700 folks will know a lot more about it after 10/9/10.

Find the Second Glass on the web, on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

Fashion Performance Manager Ari Paoletti is the Founder of Deconize Style...

...and a Basstown resident at one of Boston's best dance parites, Make It New

Last year, the fashion show at Harvest Fest featured a TON of stylized and fashion forward looks from some of our favorite local fashion shops and boutiques. Looks from poor little rich girl, Artifaktori and Black & Blues Boutique filled the Armory with style and beauty.

The looks were great last year...

And like most things from Harvest Fest 2009, gave the organizers some indegestion as we tried to create something spectacular, without really knowing what we were doing. We think the guests probably were more likely to notice the lovely looks parading up and down the runway, but this year we’re bringing in an expert to help us enjoy it too.

...and with Ari's help, they'll be even better at Harvest Fest 2010

As part of my work as Director of Operations for the 1st Annual, Together Music Festival, I got a chance to work with Ari Paoletti, a renowned local fashion designer and DJ (Volvox). Ari managed the Get Together: a record fair, trade show and, you guessed it, fashion performance. Watching what she coordinated that day at the Villa Victoria, I knew that we had to find a way for her to work on Harvest Fest. A few emails and conversations later, we had ourselves a Fashion Show Manager. With Ari in the fold, not only will the show be visually stunning, but I and the other organziers won’t have to worry about it, and might actually be able to enjoy it from the Super Supporter Box on the Mezzanine.

Note: You can find Deconize products in our very own Grand in Union Square.

Originally posted on...August 1st, 2010
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The Relaunch of the Somerville Local First Website – A resource to find Locally Owned and Independent Businesses in Somerville

Welcome to the new SLF website! We’re excited to completely relaunch our web presence in an effort to better promote the local movement and our members. At the same time, we hope to engage in meaningful dialogue with you, our fellow community members.

This site is intended to serve as a community resource: a place for learning and discussion. To help you continue to Shift your Shopping to local and independent businesses, we are incorporating a number of new features:

The SLF Blog – Our new blog based site will feature wide ranging contributions every week from many different sources, including:
- SLF Staff, Interns and Board of Directors
- SLF Members – entrepreneurs, artists and nonprofit directors
- Community Bloggers – community members who are passionate about ‘local’ and want to share their Somerville stories
- National Experts – people around the country who are working to build strong local living economies
- Multimedia galore! – We’ll be posting photos, reviews, videos and more to the site in the coming months. We hope these tools will continue to build the awareness and behavior change we need to take our movement to the next level.
- Campaign and Event pages – We’ll have living pages dedicated to the 10% Shift, Shift your Shopping, Move Your Money, Harvest Fest and SomerFun, which will be updated throughout the year.
- Tweets from around the ‘ville – A live-updating tweet list of SLF members and SLF partners
- A more active and engaging set of content about the Local Movement, here in Somerville and beyond
- Shift & Save coupons! – Want to buy local? Want to save money? Then buy Shift & Save coupons from the SLF website. These coupons get you great deals from our members and help provide much needed capital to the SLF organization. COMING SOON!
- Real time, location based mobile coupons on your smartphone! – SLF has partnered to pilot a location based coupon system for iPhone and Android users. Simply come to our home page, click on the Mobile App widget from anywhere in Somerville, and see offers from our members in real time. COMING SOON!
- An easy way to JOIN SLF – We now have membership categories for businesses, artists, nonprofits and community members. Each community can easily join our growing network and become part of the movement to build and sustain our local economy in Somerville.

This is just the first step to developing a community resource for local economies like no other. We want to know what you think…in fact, one of the main reasons why we chose this format was to create and foster dialogue. So if there’s something you’d like to see, something you like (or don’t like), please let us know.

Stay tuned this week for daily blog posts, including the beginning of a video series on SLF developed by Street Attack. We will also be hearing from our first Community Bloggers and providing more details on our Shift & Save coupons and mobile applications!

Shift Happens

~jG

Originally posted on...July 19th, 2010
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Harvest Fest: Our first brewery announced and a remarkable final act for Harvest Fest 2010

Rapscallion Brewery will be @ Harvest Fest 2010

We’re pleased to announce that Rapscallion Brewery will be at Harvest Fest. The co-owners are great guys and big fans of and participants in the Local Movement. And you’re likely to see them in a Somerville bar if you look hard enough.

Their slogan: Think Local, Drink Local and we couldn’t agree more. That’s a big part of what Harvest Fest is all about.

Aircraft Aerialists to Create Visually Stunning Finale

This idea has been kicking around for a while, but its now a reality. At the conclusion of Harvest Fest Session II (titled Local is the Future), the Zebbler Encanti Experience will team up with Aircraft Aerial Arts (think Local Cirque du Soleil).

We’ll have aerial performances up to 20 feet in the air on the ring and silks choreographed with some of Boston’s best progressive electronic music from Encanti and 3 screens of award winning video from Zebbler…and we still have some surprises on top of that.

We really can’t wait to see this, and it may just be the only time this has ever happened in greater Boston? So ya, this is how we do our fundraisers.