The iconic Night Market will make a popular return to launch and set the scene for the month-long 2023 Orange Wine Festival.
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Orange Region Vignerons Association executive officer Charlotte Gundry said there will be 44 sites with a mix of wine, beer, cider and food producers as well as live music on Friday, September 29.
"The Night Market is an iconic way of seeing what the region has to offer," she said.
"If you want to understand or get a little bit of a taste of Orange, the Night Market is fairly accessible and you can just come along and see what's available and try a few things."
Ms Gundry said it will be a similar format to previous years and will take up most of Robertson Park.
"It's a really nice time of year with the weather being fairly settled compared to previous years," Ms Gundry said.
"It's just a great way to start the festival we think and set the scene for a month of getting out and enjoying what the region has to offer from a food and wine perspective but also other things,
"We've got quite a suite of different types of events in the program including gallery exhibitions and there's the Lonely Mountain Ultra's listed in there this year and then there's a couple of the retailers are getting involved. The White Place is hosting little tastings at the shop.
"There's a really nice mix of the normal things like the lovely long lunches in the cellar door and the vineyards but also trying to engage with the rest of the community."
The festival has grown significantly since it started increasing from a week to a month of events and entertainment.
"There was a rationale behind that," Ms Gundry said of the increase.
"If we try to condense everything there's this kind of natural cannibalisation of everyone's events.
"One Saturday would just be chock-a-block and therefore everybody was just competing for essentially the same market so we thought by spreading it out over a month people would then have more opportunity to put on events if they want to.
"Also it gives from a tourism perspective it gives more people more choices around if they can come up for one weekend in October rather than just going, oh we missed the festival because it only happened in the first two weeks."
In it's modern format the Orange Wine Festival has been running since 2005 but the original concept, which was one weekend, was 1998 or 1999.
The Orange Wine Festival Night Market will be open from 5.30pm to 8.30pm at Robertson Park and the ticket format has changed this year due to rising costs of everything from infrastructure to glassware.
"Our hire costs have gone up 25 per cent since COVID so this event we used to just barely be able to make it work with a lower entry cost but we just can't do that anymore unfortunately," Ms Gundry said.
The new entry price is $10 and it will cost $2 extra for a glass.
"We're trying to encourage people to buy a glass but not be too disadvantaged in buying a glass so you're not paying $15, your're paying $10 entry and $2 for the glass," she said.
This year Diesel and Blue Doggie Daycare will also have a dedicated pop-up Doggie Creche onsite for those who can't leave their dog at home or risk leaving them at their AirBnB.
The month-long festival will end with an Altitude event at Lake Canobolas at the end of October.
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Tanya Marschke
I am based at Orange and cover a wide range of subjects as well as the weekly business column. I've worked consistently in the the media industry since 2006 including the past seven years at the Central Western Daily. Before moving to Orange, I worked as a journalist at weekly newspapers the Beaudesert Times and the Gold Coast Sun in Queensland, as well as the Scone Advocate in the Hunter Valley. I started my career at the Ridge News in Lightning Ridge while I completed my journalism studies remotely at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.
I am based at Orange and cover a wide range of subjects as well as the weekly business column. I've worked consistently in the the media industry since 2006 including the past seven years at the Central Western Daily. Before moving to Orange, I worked as a journalist at weekly newspapers the Beaudesert Times and the Gold Coast Sun in Queensland, as well as the Scone Advocate in the Hunter Valley. I started my career at the Ridge News in Lightning Ridge while I completed my journalism studies remotely at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.
