Guests can taste hundreds of wines while sampling food and listening to live music during Wine and Food Week.
Woodlands residents and visitors can taste hundreds of wines while sampling food and listening to live music during Wine and Food Week, one of the largest multiday wine and culinary events in the region.
But behind the festivities is a charitable cause: Literacy efforts across Montgomery County.
The John Cooper School Fine Arts Council teamed up with Wine and Food Week to raise funds for its major literary event and for a local literacy organization. The council will host a wine pull at its tent during the H-E-B Wine Walk at Market Street where attendees can pay $10 for a chance to pull a bottle that’s worth up to $30. Proceeds from the wine walk go to funding the signature author series, which is an annual luncheon that brings local and best-selling authors for book signings, a keynote speech and a silent auction. This year, New York Times best-selling novelist Gilliam Flynn will be the featured speaker on Dec. 4 at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott.
“We’re not there to make money, we’re really there to promote the author series,” said Denise Hayes, co-president of The John Cooper School Fine Arts Council.
The author series raises funds for charitable organizations dedicated to improving literacy in Montgomery County. Tickets to the author series range from $150 to $5,000. Last year, the author series raised $2,500 for the Montgomery County Food Bank and Meals on Wheels.
The John Cooper School will be one of many tents during the wine walk, which will transform central park at Market Street into a tented area with hundreds of bite-sized creations from executive chefs paired with wines from across the world.
Jasper’s is one of the restaurants that will be featured during the wine walk. Each of the nearly 20 restaurants will serve a bite-sized serving to each attendee that strolls to its tent. Jasper’s executive chef, Scott Newman, has been hard at work creating his menu for wine walk. He will serve 600 bites of Jasper’s signature macaroni and cheese topped with a bourbon-glazed pork belly.
“If you’re going to make 600 of anything, you’re going to want to pick something that represents the restaurant well, tastes delicious and is something you can do in one or two bites at most,” Newman said.
The restaurant is also expected to serve food during the Wine Rendezvous Grand Tasting and Chef Showcase on June 6 at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel and Convention Center. Newman will serve a seared Anson Mills grit cake topped with peach barbecue duck confit and avocado relish.
The wine walk is one of the three major events being hosted during the 11th annual Wine and Food Week, which is held between June 1-7.
The weeklong event is expected to attract more than 11,000 people this year and will showcase 75 restaurants and 200 wineries. Attendees can peruse and sample the 500 to 600 different wines and hundreds of different bitesized foods across the festival’s seven events.
Aside from benefitting the author series by The John Cooper School, Wine and Food Week’s second benefactor is New Danville, a 42-acre masterplanned community that works to integrate adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities by providing affordable housing, social and job-based skills and by promoting self-reliance through woodshop, sewing and gardening training.