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By Holly Miyasaki
It’s a marriage of food and drink celebrated with the inaugural Okanagan Food and Drink Festival this weekend.
“This is a giant tasting, the biggest tasting the Okanagan has ever seen,” says festival producer Adam Bloch. “I want to stress this is not a party… it’s a cultural education event.”
In addition to about 50 vendors featuring food, beer, wine and spirits, there will be speakers offering free seminars on topics such as whiskey and beer.
There will also be a trade event Saturday to allow social networking for restaurants.
Bloch runs Hopscotch in Vancouver, a similar festival which has seen 13 years of popularity and growth.
“The one in Vancouver is so vastly successful we wanted to take this somewhere else,” he explains, adding he scouted other cities like Seattle, Whistler, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria. “It was just so obvious when we got to the Okanagan that this was the place to be.”
Bloch says he’s noticed the community is strongly into supporting local vendors.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure people of Kelowna are very into local (products),” he says.
At the same time, organizers wanted to introduce international items to the local palate.
“We wanted people drinking Okanagan wine because it was the best wine, not because it was the only wine able to be sampled,” he says. “We really wanted there to be an option so people drinking Okanagan wine did so because they enjoyed it the most.”
That also goes for the foods, spirits and beers available for sampling. Bloch has managed to bring a cross-section of items from all over the globe.
The way the festival works is once ticket holders enter the site, where there are about 150 different things to sample, they can purchase $1 tokens. Samples are redeemed for a certain number of tokens.
The event isn’t all about food and beverage though. The Canadian Music Therapy Trust Fund receives partial proceeds from the Okanagan Food and and Drink Festival.
“It’s a national charity, and they help people that have been in unfortunate situations,” explains Bloch.
Funds will be used for music therapy programs in B.C.
The Okanagan Food and Drink Festival runs Friday night from 6-10 p.m. and Saturday from 7-11 p.m. at the Kelowna Curling Club. Tickets are available online/https://www.microspec.com/tix123/etic.cfm?code=Okanag2009. For more information visit the festival website/www.excitethesenses.com.
entertainment@kelowna.com/(250) 575-0613
Photos from Vancouver’s version of the Okanagan Food and Drink Festival, called Hopscotch (photos contributed):
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Similar to the Vancouver festival, this weekend sees the inaugural Okanagan Food and Drink Festival this weekend. (Photo contributed)
Tags: adam bloch, foodconnect.com, hopscotch, okanagan food and drink festival
