When Marie Delbarry was first invited to set foot on the grounds at Rancho Los Cerritos by someone she met who worked there, she knew she had to find a way to make something happen at the historic site.
Immediately, she started dreaming up a day that would fuse all of the things she’s come to love about Long Beach—a place she moved to from France just one year ago.
That day will come Sunday, July 9, when “A Day At The Rancho” will offer organic California wine, charcuterie and live jazz music from noon to 5:30, which will be followed by a separate ticketed intimate open-fire dinner for 60 people. “A Night At The Rancho” will feature chef Ivan Guillen and will last from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tickets for the daytime event are $60, and for the dinner, they are $165.
Last year, Delbarry moved to Long Beach to help her friend Alicia Kemper run Buvons Wine Bar + Shop in the Zaferia District as the general manager. She says it’s the people she’s been able meet at Buvons that made her first big one-day festival—which could draw up to 350 people—possible. It’s something, she says, she’s always wanted to do.
“I’d like to blend all of my passions, which is music, wine and food,” she said. “You don’t need to be anything to appreciate this kind of thing—it talks to everyone.”
Both meat and vegetarian-friendly charcuterie picnic baskets will be offered for purchase by Teresa Cabansag, who has worked as a chef at restaurants Gwen and Otium. Guests will be able to take their picnic baskets home.
Throughout the day and evening, live jazz arrangements with musicians plucked from a few well known bands in the Long Beach-Los Angeles area will perform. Kevin Martin of Brainstory will be among them.
“The musicians that are going to play all know each other,” Delbarry said. “But they are not playing under their band names, because I want them to improvise too.”
Wine selections from Buvons will be available, but Delbarry also invited small production, natural winemakers from all over the state to offer tastings of their wines: Phelan Farms, LA River Wine Company, Jumbo Time Wines Delmore, Fiky Fiky, Herrmann York, Surreal Wines Good Boy Wine and more.
“You’re not going to say no to a good wine, right?” Delbarry said. “And it’s just nice to meet the person that is making the wine.”
Although Buvons will be involved in the event, Delbarry is organizing the picnic and dinner under her own company, Four Mains, which is a French reference to “four hands,” a collaboration between two people. She named her new company after her first dinner collaboration in Long Beach.
Everyone that Delbarry tapped for the festival has been among the group she’s come across in the past year that have inspired her in some way. In Paris, Delbarry explained, social culture doesn’t seem to have the same ambitious drive that she’s seen and felt in Long Beach.
“There are so many talented people,” she said of Long Beach. “If we all put our strengths together, we are stronger.”
More information and tickets for the event can be found here.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the styling of Marie Delbarry’s last name and the spelling of Ivan Guillen’s last name.