Get ready for a huge celebration loaded with great food, wine, gardens, learning, celebrity chef demos, and a whole “Airstream Village” of Airstream and other trailers as cocktail bars, retail shops and homes at the upcoming 18th Annual Sunset Celebration Weekend.
Usually these are held at splendiferous homes but since Sunset magazine is moving its test gardens and outdoor test kitchens to Cornerstone, they are also moving their celebration here.
Chefs doing demos on the Sunset test kitchen stages will include Ludo Lefebvre from Portland, Tanya Holland, Ayesha Curry, Cindy Pawlcyn, Ellie Krieger, Amanda Haas, Perry Hoffman and many others.
A few of us got to tour the new layout this week, including the “Cocktail Garden” just off Amy and Fred Groth’s Prohibition Spirits tasting room, a small “Backyard Orchard” planted to come to fruition in a progressive sequence throughout the year, a “Farm” garden with perfect beds of kitchen vegetables and herbs, and an intensive production garden of flowers grown for arrangements.
Designed by Homestead Design Collective of Berkeley, all of the gardens are organic, and three of the steel planters were made right here in Sonoma by Anastasia and Steve Chiurco’s Steel Geisha iron works. We were assured that all nurseries in the Bay Area will be well supplied with the plants in Sunset’s Cornerstone Gardens since they won’t be for sale on site.
About half of the designers’ gardens were removed to make way for these permanent Sunset magazine lifestyle gardens, but many beautiful and interesting ones remain.
Over Sunset Celebration Weekend there will be a Live Fire cooking experience with Senior Food Editor Elaine Johnson demonstrating some of the recipes in Sunset’s just-published “Camp Sunset” cookbook.
Among the little side shows will be a solarized 1955 Airstream trailer parked in front of Nina Gerety’s beautiful Potter Green garden and environment shop, where she says she will have one of those coveted little wooden tear drop trailers inside. This one will be a prototype of a customized trailer made by Avalon of Benicia. Broadway Catering will dispense edibles from the tear drop.
The beer and wine seminars cost $20 with tastings, and Eva Bertran of Gloria Ferrer will lead the one covering the waterfront of all sparkling wines, and Ziggy the Wine Gal will make an appearance.
With a circulation of more than 4.6 million, Sunset’s Wine Editor Sara Schneider says that Sunset readers drink 11 million glasses of wine per week. Good news for Sonoma’s largest crop. $35 online, $45 at gate, $125 VIP, kids 12 and under free advance, $5 at gate. Parking at Sonoma Valley Airport with shuttles. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days, VIPs 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Advance tickets at sunset.com/cw.
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