If you drive out Highway BB toward the bluffs the first weekend of October, you’ll smell it before you see it: crushed grapes, woodsmoke, and whatever’s on the grill. Les Bourgeois Vineyards is throwing its annual Crush Festival Saturday, October 3, and Sunday, October 4, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days, and it’s one of the bigger weekends of the fall around here.
The festival is built around the harvest, and it shows. There’s a grape stomp competition for anyone who’s ever wanted to know what that actually feels like, tastings of the winery’s limited-release harvest varieties, and tours through the production side of the operation — crush pad, barrel room, cellar, bottling line. If you’ve only ever seen the tasting room from a patio chair, this is the weekend to see how the wine actually gets made.
Outside, there’s a hillside stage with live music running both days, hayrides for families, craft vendor booths, and local food. It’s the kind of event where you can plan to stay twenty minutes and end up staying three hours, which is more or less the point.
The festival spans the winery’s two blufftop venues: the main grounds at the Tasting Room & Gift Shop and the A-Frame down the hill, both perched above the Missouri River with the kind of view that makes visitors from Columbia and St. Louis stop mid-sentence. Katy Trail riders finishing up a run from Rocheport or Boonville tend to time their afternoons around exactly this kind of stop.
For Rocheport, weekends like this matter beyond the wine. Crush Festival is one of the busiest tourism draws of the fall for our stretch of the river — it fills the B&Bs, keeps Central Street shops open later, and puts more cars than usual on Highway BB and through town. If you’re headed to Rocheport proper that weekend for other reasons — the General Store, Meriwether, the trailhead — plan for extra traffic and, if you want a table anywhere nearby, a reservation.
Both venues are open their regular hours the rest of the weekend too, so if crowds aren’t your thing, the wine and the view aren’t going anywhere — Crush Festival just adds the stomp, the stage, and the hayride on top.
Details on hours, tastings, and the two venues are on our directory pages for the Tasting Room and the A-Frame, and on our event listing for the festival itself.
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