ASPEN FOOD AND WINE CLASSIC

The Aspen Food and Wine Classic is three days in mid-June in Aspen, Colorado, at nearly eight thousand feet: five Grand Tastings under tents in Wagner Park, at the foot of Aspen Mountain, where more than a hundred and fifty winemakers, distillers and cooks pour and serve, and around them some eighty seminars, demonstrations and tastings, with dinners and parties between. It is given by Food & Wine, the magazine, and it opens the town’s summer.

It began as a way to fill the town in June, when the lifts had shut. Just over three hundred people came to a tent in a car park.

The Shoulder Season

Aspen was a silver camp, founded in 1879 by miners who stayed on the far side of the Continental Divide when the governor asked them to come back. By 1891 it was the most productive silver district in the country, and two years later the price of silver collapsed and the town emptied. It had fewer than a thousand people by 1930.

The skiing brought it back, and so did Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist who came in 1945, bought much of the town, and in 1949 held a festival for Goethe’s two hundredth birthday that became the Aspen Institute and the music festival. Early June, between the skiing and the summer, was quiet.

In 1983 Gary Plumley, who kept a wine shop in the town, and Bob and Ruth Kevan, who kept a restaurant at Snowmass, put on a wine tasting to fill it: a tent in a car park at Snowmass Village, a tasting on a covered tennis court, and wine and puddings under a tent beside the Roaring Fork. Fifty winemakers came, and just over three hundred guests. It was run by volunteers, and still is, some six hundred of them.

Food & Wine took it on in 1986 and put its name to it the year after. Its tents are now in Wagner Park, in the middle of the town, and some five thousand people come. It was cancelled for the first time in 2020, and held in September the year after, before going back to June.

The Tasting

The Grand Tasting is the centre of it: a pavilion of white tents on the park, with the mountain above and more than a hundred and fifty producers under the canvas, in five sessions across the three days. A pass admits to all of them.

Around the tents are the seminars, more than fifty of them on wine, spirits and cocktails, and twenty cooking demonstrations, each now with a tasting of the dish.

Since 1988 the magazine has named its Best New Chefs, ten a year. Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud were in the first ten. The previous year’s class has its own corner of the pavilion.

The newcomers do everything on the Friday. Those who know it save themselves for Sunday.

In 2026 it ran from 19 to 21 June; Nancy Silverton, a Best New Chef of 1990, cooked the dishes of her award year again, and the Classical Invitational was held on the top of Aspen Mountain.

What to Know

It runs from Friday to Sunday on a weekend in mid-June. A pass costs about three thousand dollars and admits to the seminars, the demonstrations and every session of the Grand Tasting. Dinners and the late parties are ticketed separately, and the passes sell out.

Smart casual: a jacket without a tie, and shoes for grass and cobbles. The evenings are cold at that height, whatever the afternoon was.

Aspen has its own airport, with flights from Denver, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. Stay in the town, within a walk of Wagner Park. The Jerome has stood on Main Street since 1889.

The mistake is to drink at eight thousand feet as one drinks at sea level. Arrive a day early, and take a glass of water for every glass of wine.

The Court

The Aspen Food and Wine Classic is not the Court’s own. Passes are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in the town, and the table afterward. The Court is back in Aspen later in the month for the Ideas Festival.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.