The 16th annual South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami Beach had south beach on fire with a bevy of signature cocktails, entertainment, seminars and tastings.
Officially dubbed the Food Network & Cooking Channel South Beach Wine & Food Festival is a national, star-studded, five-day destination event showcasing the talents of the world’s most renowned wine and spirits producers, chefs and culinary personalities.
The Festival benefits FIU’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management and the Southern Wine & Spirits Beverage Management Center. To date, the Festival has raised more than $24 million for the School.
The Free Press Urban Traveler was in the mix with over 50,000 “foodies” scattered throughout Miami Beach attending various events. Holding court on Miami Beach was the Grand Tasting Village. The Village is comprised of vendor/sponsor tents for festival goers to peruse, sample and taste preferred wines, food and social media photo ops.
In mid center of the sand-filled Village was Food Networks Chef Aaron Sanchez, a celebrated panelist on the hit reality-based cooking television game show series Chopped and his SOBEWFF cooking partner Chef Roble facing off in a food-feud style cook off to showcase their skills as they prepared some of their favorite dishes. Friday night patrons trekked to the Art of Tiki: A Cocktail Showdown hosted by Robert Irvine. Irvine was front and center as he greeted guest with a smile and a coveted photo op! The author and Food Network star made his way to the center of the Surfcomber Hotel and created a fun filled cocktail experience, where contestants gathered for a time based competition to hurriedly devour tapas and libations; first couple to gobble the tasteful morsels was crowned the winner! On Saturday, rap icon and Food Channel star Reverend Run and DJ Ruckus hosted the BACARDÍ Beach Party where they lit up the stage with their DJ skills and rap anecdotes as concert goers continued their late night bite tasting. Shown at the BACARDÍ Beach Party are local Jax foodies Eros Stewart and Shayla Anderson. Take a look and walk this way in 2018!
Be the first to comment