A stompin' good time: Altus community celebrates fruit of its labor
Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/WhatsUp/67257/
By their nature, Altus natives say the town never needs a reason to celebrate, but in 1984 it found a good one.
That was the year the area was officially recognized as an American Viticultural Area by the U.S. Department of the Treasury of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.
The news gave Altus folks another reason to pour a glass of wine while rejoicing in many delights furnished by its biggest cash crop: grapes.
"Altus is always looking for fun," said Paul Post, the vice president of Post Familie Vineyards & Winery who has had a hand in the festival since the rebirth of the Altus Grape Festival.
The festival initially started in 1926 by the area's wineries and ran for three years before shutting down, Post said, most likely as a result of the Great Depression, not Prohibition, which prevented the sale of wine but allowed the making of home wine.
Since that time, the Altus City Park event has been going strong for 25 years with festivities such as public grape stomp competitions and grape pie-eating contests.
Post remembered when the festival first started. It featured a tug-of-war contest where the loser would fall into a pit of grapes. That activity faded out after event organizers realized that using the harvesting equipment needed to make the pits would be too much of an inconvenience at the start of the harvest season.
James Dahlem, who is serving as this year's event chairman, estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 people would stop by next Friday and Saturday to fill up the town with a population slightly more than 800.
Dahlem said the grape stomp always brings out a crowd. Some of the participants are composed of families who have been taking part for years, he said. During the event, contestants try to make the most juice by pouncing barefoot on about 18 pounds of grapes in a minute's time. The winner is determined by a measuring container.
"Your legs are purple for a couple of weeks. ... I'm just kidding," Dahlem said.
The amateur wine competition is sure to produce a couple of interesting flavors, said Michael Scott Irby, who is in charge of the event. Irby said he has seen such creations as watermelon wine, lemon wine, onion wine and one entry featuring jalepeņo peppers and honey.
"Home winemakers are very creative people," Irby said. "They can come with all sorts of things to make wine out of."
The main categories of the contest are varietal, port, generic, sparkling and fruit wines, but that can change according to the demographic and number of entries, Irby said. The pool of entries could be as large as 150.
Patrons will not be able to sample the entries -- that will be done by the judges and other contest participants -- but they can purchase a cup for $5 and sample wines from all of the town's major wineries. Additional refills can be purchased for $3.
The schedule of events on July 25 will be highlighted by a street dance starting at 8:30 p.m. with live music by the Rural Route 4, followed by a fireworks display at 9:30 p.m. The event kicks off with a performance by the Cummins Prison Band, a well-known group composed of inmates from the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Public grape stomp competitions will take place throughout the day on July 26, but events that are sure to draw attention include the grape-pie eating contest at 11:15 a.m. and the naming of the amateur wine contest winners at 4 p.m.