The annual fall iteration of the Park City Wine Festival will return Oct. 1-3. While the Grand Tastings at Park City Mountain’s Canyons Village remain the biggest draw, organizers say the culinary experiences are another way to not only learn about wines but also enjoy more intimate moments in Park City.
The events, running Thursday through Saturday, pair local restaurants with wineries, sommeliers and wine educators for one-of-a-kind meals. Festival Event Director Kristen Slater said the goal is for guests to plan a full week around wine.
Ticketing is offered à la carte, so guests can customize their festival experience, Slater said. The schedule includes five-course dinners and three-course lunches, some themed around the wines, others adding guided hikes on nearby trails. And even if people attended these experiences in the past, Slater said each menu and slate of wines will be different.
“We spend a lot of time curating those to really create something completely off menu,” she said. “These are custom pairings. This isn’t just, ‘We’ll slap these two together.’ This works, and they’re really passionate about what they’re doing.”
Kellie Martin, founder and chief sommelier of SommSchool, said these events get closest to the true purpose of wine.
“Wine was never meant to be enjoyed alone,” she said. “For hundreds of years, wine has always been something to enjoy with people you enjoy and food you enjoy.”
While the Grand Tastings are a great chance to sample new wines, the culinary experiences are a more guided opportunity to learn about wines, she said.
“The Culinary Experiences … are like mini master classes helping you dive deep into a region or topic of your choice,” Martin said.
One dinner at Le Depot Brasserie will focus on volcanic wines; another at Butcher Chop House is all California reds. For lunch, Hyatt Centric will host a hike and rosé pairing, which Martin likens to a wine class.
“People will learn not only about things like the production methods of rosé, but how to buy the style of rosé that perfectly matches their personal palate preferences,” she said. “They will also learn the fundamentals of mastering food and wine pairings and tasting like a pro, all while enjoying a fabulous meal.”
Guest wineries like Foley Family Wines & Spirits said the chance to sit down and talk about their wines in this intimate setting is an opportunity to fully tell their story. Foley wines will be featured in the Transcending the Glass dinner, a five-course menu of classic French cuisine with Le Depot Brasserie.
Pamela Ford, like Martin, said wine is meant to be enjoyed in community, and as a representative of Foley in Utah, her goal is to make the conversation around wine more approachable.
“One of the beautiful things about wine is that there is always more: more to learn, more to taste, more to experience. It can be overwhelming, especially for someone who wants to become well-versed but maybe isn’t sure what they enjoy or where to start,” she said.
Atypical food and wine pairings are one way she likes to show versatility with a wine, so she’s excited to partner with Chef Galen Zamara and his vision.
For the chefs, it’s a chance to be creative. LOMA, by chef-owner Adam Ross, is new to the lineup this year, and Ross said wine events like these “check a lot of boxes” for local restaurants such as his. In the past, his restaurant, Twisted Fern, was a venue.
“Pairing menus are a blast to create,” Ross said. “Leaning into notes from the different wines and creating cuisine that pulls those elements together allows our culinary team to stretch their creativity even further than with a normal menu creation.”
Sometimes the dishes they try out for a wine dinner will later land on the full menu, he said. Selfishly, he said, it’s a way to reconnect with what he loves most about his job.
“Working with a winemaker or specific portfolio adds direction to the menu development. It’s fun to experiment; it’s one of the reasons I was drawn to becoming a chef,” Ross said.
James Beard-nominated Chef James Dumas will also participate, this time with his newest speakeasy concept, Alpinist Deer Valley. Dumas, who’s been a chef in the area for almost 35 years, said he always looks forward to the Park City Wine Festival.
The event at Alpinist is a lunchtime hike, and Dumas said diners will loop an easy trail at Deer Valley Resort, stop for a little wine break at the halfway point and then head back for lunch on the deck.
As an outdoor lover, he loves that festival organizers decided to add a taste of “life above 8,300 feet” to the schedule.
“My inspiration comes from just getting out and touching the sky every day,” he said. “I dig what they’re doing with these activities because it opens people up to a whole new realm, and I think it’s a great advertisement for Park City, too.”
He said the hike will take guests past areas where he will even harvest ingredients for dishes, like mountain sage or juniper. He plans to create the specific menu much closer to the event, work off the weather and the wine.
“I do it backward,” Dumas said. “Because a somm will come in and look at a dish and pair the wine to the dish, right? I taste the wine and create the dish (based) off the wine.”
Dumas said as much as he loves the challenge, his favorite part about these events is the connections made around the table between both locals and visitors.
Both chefs praised the festival planners for being organized and including them. Slater, in turn, praised the participating chefs for bringing their all for these events.
“(They’ve) taken the time to make sure that that is the best wine from that winery that could be paired with that dish, which is really special and something that most people wouldn’t be able to do on their own off of a wine list,” she said.
The hikes are some of her favorites, too. In addition to the hike with Alpinist, the lunch with Hyatt Centric will also include a hike around Park City Mountain, and another is planned at Deer Valley with the Deer Valley Cafe. She said these events “pair wine with adventure.”
“Being in such a fun town like Park City, we love to highlight the local flavor, physically, with the restaurant, but also, it’s so fun to highlight some of those activities that you can only do in Park City with that landscape,” she said. “We’ve had a couple people who’ve met at the hikes, and now they go to the hikes every year together. So it’s a really fun and more intimate experience.”
The list of culinary events intentionally spans a variety of cuisines and price points, she said, so there should be something for everyone.
Tickets are now on sale, and Slater said they’re already around 50% sold. For more information and to reserve a spot, visit parkcitywinefest.com/schedule.