In the category of swanky food and wine events, The Embarcadero Center and San Francisco Magazine are putting on the San Francisco Fallfest 2004, an exhibition of wine and food in a “European style marketplace with live jazz.” Last time I looked, Justin Herman plaza looked nothing like a European marketplace, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They’ve got an impressive list of caterers and wineries who are on tap to both ply the attending public with free samples as well as some interesting demonstrations of culinary acrobatics and potentially some informational talks.

Most interesting to me are the “private” wine seminars which are sadly sold out at this point — chances to taste horizontals or verticals of wine along with experts who talk about what THEY taste in the wines. Additionally there is a public session called “Exotic Produce Demonstration” that will involve discussion of sources for exotic produce in California as well as demonstration of cleaning and prep of these ingredients.

$75 bucks gets you into the event and presumably access to all the public sessions and tasty bites and sips. The real question is, how many tickets are they selling for this thing, because in San Francisco, no matter how good or exclusive these things are, they can turn into a day spent waiting on line after line for tiny morsels of food and baby sips of wine (like this year’s Dine About Town opening party). Shudder.

For tickets and more information on Fallfest ’04 see their Web site.

SF Fallfest 2004
Saturday October 9th
11:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Justin Herman Plaza (opposite the Ferry Building)
San Francisco