Tunes And Tastebuds Will Collide At Brisbane’s Inaugural Sip Happens Festival

Salt and pepper, chocolate and peanut butter, wine and live music – some pairings just make perfect sense. And as concertgoers in Australia – arguably home to all of the world’s finest wineries – we know the lattermost point all too well. So does Abby Bartlem, founder of the inaugural Sip Happens festival, hitting Brisbane in just a few weeks.

The four-hour festival will go down at The Triffid on Saturday September 9, running from 12pm to 4pm with three incredible acts set to take the stage: Cape York folk singer-songwriter Ella Hartwig will kick things off, followed by a set of psych-tinged garage-rock from Arugula, and finally the R&B stylings of Bowen native Zeek Power. While they perform, you’ll be able to sip away on more than 100 wines from some of Australia’s best and most innovative producers, focusing on sustainability and minimal intervention with their small-batch offerings.

To name just a few of the wineries set to be present at Sip Happens, we’re looking forward to some top drops from Babche, Witches Falls, Minimum, Beyond The Glass, Ben Murray, Black Dirty Denim, Luv’a and Rollick. And we know Bartlem can be trusted for her picks as the festival’s curator: she’s a seasoned winemaker and viticulturist with two decades of experience in the industry, her talents spanning Australia, New Zealand and even France (where we hear the wine is… Well, at least pretty damn decent).

As it’s noted in a press release, Bartlem developed the concept for Sip Happens when she “noticed the lack of opportunities for smaller wine producers to reach the Queensland market”. Her vision, it’s said, is “to raise the profile of small and interesting producers in a fun, quirky way with a focus on sustainability, organic and biodynamic practice and minimal intervention wines”.

Tickets for the first-ever Sip Happens festival are on sale now – head here to get your hands on them.