Food, wine and music await at Paihia festival

Revellers at a previous It! Bay of Islands Food and Wine Festival in Paihia. Photo / Peter de Graaf

A feast of music, food and wine awaits festivalgoers who head to Paihia's Village Green tomorrow.

This year's It! Bay of Islands Food and Wine Festival will be headlined by Fly My Pretties, a 12-strong "super group" led by Black Seeds frontman Barnaby Weir.

Other top Kiwi musicians joining Weir on stage will include singers Ria Hall and Bailey Wiley, Laughton Kora and Mike Fabulous.

The job of warming up the crowd will go to highly danceable covers bands JPG and Automatic 80s, and award-winning singer-songwriter Troy Kingi.

Music is of course only half the reason people head to the festival — the other is the wide range of Northland-made food, wine, craft beer and cider.

Competitive eaters will be able to test themselves in kina-sucking, oyster-shucking and pie-eating contests, while a children's zone will offer bouncy castles, face painting and a magician.

Now in its ninth year, this will be the first time the festival has tried to go zero-waste.

Plates and cutlery will be compostable and revellers will have to rent re-usable glasses at $1 a pop. The site will have a variety of recycling options as well as pig bins for food scraps.

The festival was originally held during Labour weekend but is now staged in early October in a bid to bring visitors to Paihia in the off-season.

Saturday's forecast is promising with MetService expecting mainly fine conditions and a maximum temperature of 20C.

As of yesterday tickets were still available via paihianz.co.nz or eventfinda.co.nz. The gates open at 11am; the music finishes at 6pm. If you're coming from Kerikeri you can catch a bus from Subway at 10.30am, returning from Paihia's Maritime Building at 6.15pm. See the eventfinda page for more details.