The Aftermath: Westchester Magazine’s 7th Wine and Food Festival | Valhalla, NY

Disclosure: I attended this food event for free in exchange for writing a review on this blog. While this is a sponsored post, all opinions are my own.

When you know what you’re looking forward to, you just can’t help but get excited about it days before the actual event. One of my favorite festivals is the annual Westchester Magazine’s Wine and Food Festival, specifically their Grand Tasting Village at Kensico Dam Plaza in Valhalla, NY. It is now on its 7th year and it was our third time to attend this festival last Saturday. (You can find previous recaps here and here.) It’s typically a six-day festival. This year, it started on June 6th and ended on June 11th.

Since we started attending three years ago, we’ve only gone to the Grand Tasting Village. Not for lack of interest in the other events; it’s simply quite a distance from where we are, so going on a weekday is out of the question.

We knew better than to eat a heavy breakfast that morning. We were there early so there’s no missing the good stuff! Thankfully, it was a great day for an outdoor festival. The sun was out. The crowd was ready to wine and dine. The place was buzzing with anticipation.

Here’s a picture us before we got started. There was still a queue waiting to get in when this picture was taken.

There were five Chef Demos scheduled that day:

1. Bernard Janssen of Zwilling J.A. Henckels
2. Christian Petroni of Fortina
3. Michael Pskilakis of MP Taverna
4. Peter Kelly of X20 Xaviars on the Hudson & David DiBari of The Cookery
5. Charlotte Voisey of The Proper Pour

Here’s Chef Bernard Janssen of Zwilling J.A. Henckels. He made Seared Branzino and Parsnip Mousselle with spring veggies, kafir lime and crunchy bacon. Mmmm!

Here’s Chef Christian Petroni of Fontina.

Now here are some of the food and drinks from the event! It doesn’t cover everything because I stopped taking pictures at some point and focused on eating and drinking. If you’re there, you might as well enjoy the moment!

By this time, we’ve eaten and drunk more than our fair share of food and wine, so we were all too ready to leave.

Westchester Magazine’s Wine and Food Festival is definitely a delicious way to build a sense of community. If you’ve never been to this festival, brace yourself. There’s food, wine, beer and booze a-plenty! Everyone’s there to do what you came out there to do – indulge. You go from one table to another, eating and drinking to your hungry little heart’s content. No one’s monitoring how often you go to each table, so you can knock yourself out and no one’s the wiser. Can’t wait to go again next year!