Brimming with vino and music, Wine Amplified barrels into MGM Resorts Village

By John Katsilometes

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014 | 4:02 p.m.

Say this for MGM Resorts Village: This asphalt park is mighty versatile. In less than one week, we’re moving from chaps to chardonnay.

On the heels, or, if you will, spurs, of last weekend’s wingding country music spectacle Route 91 Harvest is the 9th annual Rock ’n Roll Wine Amplified Festival wine-tasting and music marathon. The event runs Friday and Saturday, with tickets $69 per day and $129 for a two-day pass. VIP tickets are $159 per day and $299 for two days (check wineamplified.com for information). Gates open at 4 p.m. both days.

Wine Amplified is the first music festival in Las Vegas to go entirely cash free. This is made possible through wristbands embedded with RFID chips. Festival attendees will load Festival Bucks (what the currency of Wine Amplified is called) onto these wristbands in advance or onsite and then make purchases on those bands throughout the event. These bands are good for food, drink, T-shirts, everything.

As for what is presented onstage, similar to Route 91, the Wine Amplified lineup is jammed with familiar acts and plenty of peripheral activity — especially the quaffing of vino — to keep fans sated.

Friday’s lineup on the main stage with Mandalay Bay in the backdrop spotlights Train, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Better Than Ezra, Of Verona and Ayron Jones and The Way. On Saturday, it’s Blink-182, The Violent Femmes, Magic!, The Mowgli’s and Mystic Roots Band. The Beach Stage, built on a blanket of sand on the southeast corner of the acreage, features a conveyor belt of emerging bands.

In the festival grounds’ interior is a speakeasy with yet more acts hustling in and out — Frankie Moreno is there Saturday night, as one billboard-gracing example — and around the grounds is a vast variety of vino.

In the middle is a structure known as the Barrel encircled by the Wine Trail. The 520-foot Wine Trail is shaped like a wine glass (with the venue’s main entrance serving as the stem) as visible from above and is dotted with offerings from more than 40 wineries. Inside the structure is a lineup of 30 wineries, 10 craft beer suites and a single 160-foot-tall wine barrel.

The international wine brands, all presented by Southern Wine & Spirits of Nevada, include Caymus, Justin, Ferrari-Carano, Francis Ford Coppola and Chateau Ste. Michelle.

It’s an ambitious project, but the guys gripping the tap on the barrel are confident of an entertaining weekend. It’s just been a busy effort, as the Village has turned into just that, with officials and staff working long hours on site.

“We are moving from a one-night, one-act concert at Mandalay Bay Beach to a full-blown festival,” is how event co-founder Chris Hammond describes the Wine Amplified fermentation process. “Eight years ago, we had 4,000 show up. Now our conservative estimate is 10,000, each day.”

Hammond and partner Sonny Barton found an eager teammate in an old friend, Chris Baldizan, who is fast becoming one of the more prominent entertainment figures in the city for his “activation” of unused space. Once the head of Mandalay Bay’s entertainment division, Baldizan has taken the lead on MGM Resorts’ outdoor festival planning and execution, and one of his first initiatives was to make some sense out of the 15 acres of real estate across the Strip from Mandalay Bay and the Luxor.

Hammond and Barton had achieved success and notoriety with their small-scale Rock ’n Roll Wine events, and eight years of putting on Wine Amplified shows, drawing such acts as Everclear, Gavin DeGraw, Third Eye Blind, Sugar Ray and Ziggy Marley. Train was one act who played Mandalay Bay Beach, as was a rising band out of Las Vegas called Imagine Dragons.

As Barton says, the event had found a groove at Mandalay Bay, but the opportunity to make it something special was too enticing to pass up.

“We looked at the enormity of the space, this ginormous footprint, and got to work on ways to make it feel intimate,” Barton said. “Well, we had sand and water at the beach, and we’re adding sand here, on the Beach Stage. We’ve got different areas, the speakeasy and beer garden, that are more intimate inside what is really a large space. We approached it like a blank canvas, and we have spent a lot of time out here figuring out how to effectively use the space.”

And Barton has come to a conclusion, as the first Wine Amplified Festival nears:

“It doesn’t really feel that big anymore.”

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.