A feast to savour at the Taste of Tasmania
Bumper crowds flock to Taste to enjoy entertainment as well as delicious food.
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WITH cabaret, choir, comedy and circus performers spread across four stages, the Taste of Tasmania entertainment program has hundreds of acts suited to all ages.
The exciting line-up and delicious food is already drawing big crowds, with 53,512 people flooding through the gates on day one — up 12,504 on last year’s opening.
FOODIES READY FOR A SWEET TIME AT THE TASTE
Festival director Brooke Webb said the attendance figure was the highest ever for a single day since its launch in 1988.
“That broke all the records in the history of the festival,” she said.
“The weather is obviously a really big ingredient in that, but we had Salamanca Market, the cruise ships, all the independent producers we have here and also the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. We are the finish line for them.”
Ms Webb said this year’s Taste has 98 stalls from producers across the state, both emerging and established, serving up an exciting array of flavours from all over the world.
“We have 21 different cuisines here at the Taste,” she said.
“We have a much bigger focus this year on plant-based and global food, which I think is really reflective of the contemporary food community here in Tassie.”
FESTIVAL ORGANISERS PREDICTING A BUMPER 2019-20 TASTE
Once you quench your thirst and fill your belly, there is plenty of free family fun taking over The Lawns, with two entertainment stages and three pods bursting with activity.
There was a big crowd of children and parents listening to award-winning looping artist Adam Page. It is his first time performing at Taste.
Mr Page, of Adelaide, blows raspberries, snorts and sings in languages not yet discovered to create amazing and incredible symphonies of sound.
“The sax is my main instrument, but I do play a bunch of other instruments like guitar, piano, bass, heaps of percussion instruments, lots of flutes and also incorporate sounds from the audience,” he said.
“My aim is to connect with people and show them something they’ve never seen before.
“A lot of my music is quite silly and it’s completely improvised, so it can go any which way and with kids they take it in some pretty crazy directions.”
Entertainment programmer Sam Cole said there was family-friendly activities from the front gate all the way to the back fence each day of the festival.
“Other than Adam, who is an amazing saxophone loop extraordinaire, we’ve got a lot of kids circus and theatre, singalong songs and a bunch of really amazing world music on the stages,” he said.
“On top of that we’ve got the junior beekeepers with pollination games, Second Echo Ensemble — which are creating a big long weavers table of stories to be used in a community parade on the final day of the festival — free face painting and lots of arts activities.”
The Taste runs until Friday.
For more information visit: thetasteoftasmania.com.au
CIDER MIX HAS TAS SIGNATURE
YOU won’t have to make the tricky choice between cider or moscato at the Taste of Tasmania, with one stallholder serving up an unusual beverage which contains both.
Premiering their products to the public at the Taste, Plenty Cider owners Adam and Grace D’Arcy couldn’t wait to pour their first drink at the festival opening on Saturday.
“We have spent the past three years developing our products and really wanted to start with a bang, so The Taste of Tasmania felt like the perfect place to do a launch,” Mr D’Arcy said.
“The feedback has been fantastic. We’ve been getting a lot of love for all our products and people are really receptive to what we’ve been doing.”
The Derwent Valley brand focuses on apple cider but uses other seasonal Tasmanian fruits to create unique flavour combinations.
One of those is the Fronti, which is a blend of apple cider and a moscato grape. Mr D’Arcy believes it is possibly a world-first recipe.
“It’s not as sweet as a moscato but is a very, very sessionable cider,” he said.
“Not many people play in that area between cider and wine.
“There is only a small amount of that grape variety available in the state, so to be using that to make an apple cider blend rather than just a straight moscato has been really cool.”
Other flavours include original, apple and blueberry, and apple and cherry.
Mr D’Arcy described his ciders as the “perfect summer drink”.
If you can’t pick one, a tasting plate of four ciders is available for $21.
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