Grape Festival won’t happen but food might

Don’t count on browsing murals made of grapes or riding the Tilt-O-Whirl at the Grape Festival this year. But munching on funnel cakes and turkey legs could still happen.

The Lodi Grape Festival Board of Directors and Management announced on Tuesday that the 2020 version of the Grape Festival will not happen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, marking Lodi’s first year without a Grape Festival since a three-year period during World War II.

“We’re using the word postponed because we had a lot of our entertainment booked, and almost everything in place,” said General Manager Mark Armstrong. “So instead of canceling, we’re just postponing all that until next year. It’s a little bit of a less harsh word.”

The next Grape Festival will take place Sept. 16-19 in 2021, provided everything goes back to normal in the next year.

“Financially, it’s kind of a blow. We’ve been fiscally responsible over the years, and we do have a rainy-day fund,” Armstrong said. “But we’ve done what everybody else has done, we laid a couple of people off. We were able to get a (Paycheck Protection Program) loan to help out. We’re still in pretty good shape to go on, but that being said, we don’t need it to be going on into next year.”

Armstrong said about 60% of the Grape Festival’s income comes during the annual festival, with the rest coming from weddings, quinceañeras and events such as the Wine & Food Festival and Beer Fest. He added that one option the board is considering is a drive-through to pick up festival food during the period the festival would be running.

The board has had regular meetings during the pandemic to monitor what’s happening around the state with other fairs.

“Everybody’s canceling,” Armstrong said. “We reached out to the county health department and talked to Maggie Park, and she sees no possible way that in September you can have that many people together in a safe environment. We were thinking the same thing — there’s no way to social distance at an event as big as ours.”

The time to make a decision was fast approaching, and with that advice from Dr. Park, the board made the decision to postpone the festival until next year.

“As you get going on, within the next couple months, we’d be spending a lot of money, putting a lot of money out front, having vendors paying fees, things like that,” Armstrong said. “You’ll never get that money back. We kind of called it the point of no return. There’s only a few fairs hanging on that have them toward the end of the year, and it’s the right decision.”