Charleston Food & Wine Festival

This is the first year we've attended the Charleston Food & Wine Festival. We could have easily planned our entire four days here around the fest. Unfortunately, we didn't know about this until we read about it in Delta Airline's magazine. Bobby Flay is the signature guest this year and (unsurprisingly) all of his events were sold out long ago.

The fest has a good mix of events with prices ranging from $50 to $750. Most of the food was supplied and cooked by local restaurants. Since South Carolina has an incredibly limited wine selection and only a few microbreweries, I wasn't surprised to see mostly California and Oregon wines and beers. It was good to see local folks like Firefly Distillery pouring at the Culinary Tent though. Firefly is becoming well known for their vodkas, like SweetTea Vodka.

Because it was our first time, we made the mistake of choosing to enter the Grand Tasting Tent on Saturday afternoon. The locals have since warned us that any other time would have been better. It was a constant stampede of pushing, drinking, jostling and then eating for a solid 90 minutes as we made our way around the two different tents.

The most memorable (and my favorite) treat came from Rio Bertolini, a fresh pasta maker from Charleston. It had a cannoli like, crunchy shell confection, a scoop of sweet fresh ricotta, and raspberry sauce. (I noticed yesterday that Etcetera in Daniel Island carried their fresh pastas.) Whoever that chef with the fantastic mac n'cheese was at the South Carolina Lottery tent: you have a solid future, my friend. Thank you Jim N Nick's BBQ for the good sized pulled pork sandwiches. The mouth watering goodness satisfied my appetite and soaked up the wine. There were entirely too many soups, bisques, etc. for this type of show. A note to future food purveyors: Stick to one dish and the line in front of your both won't explode into the aisles. Move 'em in and move 'em out so as many people as possible can sample your offerings. Otherwise, people stomp off in crowds like this or just cut the line.