Good Wine From South Jersey? Find Out This Weekend

Poor Jersey wines. They possess all the glamour of the underside of a highway overpass, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard that Jersey wines are on the ascent – so much so that they have recently won medals in international wine competitions and have either beat, or come so close as to be statistically equal to, the finest French Bordeaux in several blind tastings presided over by some of the industry’s most prestigious names. Many of those award-winning wines come from South Jersey – the federally designated Outer Coastal Plain American Viticultural Area, whose terroir in the state’s southernmost counties almost exactly mirrors that of Bordeaux.

If you usually bypass the Jersey wine section at the PLCB, the first Vintage South Jersey wine and beer fest, happening throughout the weekend  at Campbell’s Field in Camden, offers a chance to try out 13 of the wineries at once. Plus, for the first time at an official wine fest, you get to pair your wine with beers brewed by three of South Jerz’s newest breweries, along with Flying Fish and Yards.

Yes, there will be food. Yes, there will be live music. Yes, there will be children and parking and nearby public transportation and beautiful skyline sunsets and cops to protect you from the imagined scary streets of Camden. You get all this for just $25 in advance or $30 at the door. And what’s better, for those of you who care about such things, you get to be at the forefront of a new wine trend, which is cool, even if it does come from New Jersey.

Vintage South Jersey [Official website]