Pivots and major CW+F moments to 'make wine out of floods'

“To say it was an unprecedented festival, I think, is an understatement.” Charleston Wine + Food Festival director Alyssa Maute Smith. She says she is still processing everything that happened this past weekend when record rainfall and high tides flooded festival grounds.

The impassable grounds at Riverfront Park in North Charleston forced the CW+F festival’s hand, causing organizers to cancel the Saturday and Sunday iterations of the Culinary Village, the festival’s most popular event. The inclement weather also forced several other big events, including opening night, inside to backup locations.

“We have very robust safety and emergency preparedness and contingency plans,” Smith told the City Paper. She said the festival works with local and national weather sources to plan for additional rain cover, since the event is rain or shine. CW+F has never had to deal with record rainfall and extra soggy grounds. Those extra tents didn’t help much this weekend.

“What contingency does not include is if the grounds are completely unsafe for people to actually be on them and our vendors to be on them. And I think that that’s what we ended up facing,” Smith said. “And so the venue changes that people saw opening night, Sabor, Smoke show, the finale, that was not a contingency plan, that was an emergency preparedness plan.”

Organizers secured the finale’s final location at 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon — a mere four hours before the event was originally scheduled to take place. Festival planners pushed the start time up an hour and moved a stage, lounge area, vendor tables and equipment to the Snyder/Spike warehouse in North Charleston.

In a speech at the finale, Smith said that at 1 p.m. Sunda, the venue at The Lawn at Ferry Wharf “said you can’t have the finale here.” She credited Snyder Events and the festival’s staff and volunteers with the ultimately successful party.

“Some people make lemonade out of lemons,” Smith said to a crowd of hundreds of revelers. “But we make wine out of floods.”

Still processing

As positive as many of the festival’s pivots were, it’s hard to ignore the general upset and frustration from ticket holders who didn’t get to attend Saturday’s or Sunday’s Culinary Village. Many people on social media asked for refunds. “All of our events are ‘sales final,’” Smith said, adding that while the event is “rain or shine,” there is an inclement weather policy in those ticket purchases that says the event can be canceled by “any sort of act of God or reasons beyond our control.”

Last weekend, ticket holders had the option to exchange their Culinary Village ticket for a remaining CW+F event or to donate their purchase to the festival, which is a tax-exempt nonprofit. Earlier this week, the festival announced unused 2024 tickets can be considered credits to future festivals. For the next five years, a 2024 ticket can be used as a gift card to anything Wine + Food related, officials said.

“Our ticket holders are important to us,” Smith said. “They’re a part of our community, just like our chefs and our beverage professionals. And, we quickly deployed communications throughout the entire weekend and tried to offer people as many options as possible for them to change their ticket for an even exchange, no additional funds paid.”

Ticket holders weren’t the only ones who had to deal with the disappointment of a rained out fest. Visiting chefs, staff and vendors had to figure out what to do with a bunch of extra food and supplies.

Louise Rakers of Nordic Cooking sold her extra sourdough on Instagram. Peculiar Pig Farm gave away free barbecue at Summerville’s Gahagan Park on Sunday. Slow Food Charleston popped up at Counter Culture Coffee on Sunday with a suggested $25 donation for attendees to enjoy shrimp dip, oysters and clams that they didn’t want to go to waste.

Folks set up in the Culinary Village’s artisan market had to come to terms with missing out on a lot of sales.

“We have businesses that rely on that weekend as one of their best performing weekends of the entire year,” Smith said. “Artisans have shared with me that they participate in Charleston Wine + Food every year because they sell more at our artisan market than they do from any other event combined all year. So it is definitely a loss for the entire community.”

Moving forward

A day before CW+F 2024 kicked off, the festival announced a new initiative. A press release described the mission as one that will “showcase the local culinary industry” and “actively contribute to its growth and sustainability.” CW+F expanded its education and workforce programs and introduced a new investment fund “dedicated to enhanced financial and educational support of the local food and beverage community.”

“It is so serendipitous that we announced at the start of this festival, this fund that would provide financial assistance and grants to people in the food and beverage industry in times of crisis, right?” Smith said. “Not knowing what would happen over the next five days.”

While the festival will expand its education programs, the ones it already has in place were an important component of this weekend’s events.

She said the 2024 festival had nearly 50 students from six high schools participating as part of CW+F’s education outreach program. “Even with the bobs and weaves that this weekend handed our team, these students were absolutely critical to us pulling this off,” she said. “They were very much a part of our team.”

The team — one made up of staff and volunteers — had to work to both put together a festival and clean one up, with a bit more mud and detritus than anyone expected.

“I think that sometimes made the situation that happened this weekend sting even more because I feel like our team delivered a stellar experience this year, even the Culinary Village,” Smith said.

So what does the future hold for the festival and the Culinary Village? Moving the Culinary Village — which takes about 10 days to set up, according to Smith — inside doesn’t seem likely. Maute Smith said that the fest will likely try to find some more indoor/outdoor venues for larger signature events, like the opening night and finale.

“We’ll be kind of unraveling the effects for a couple weeks,”Smith said Maute. “And [we’re] going to make sure that we apply lessons as much as we can with what we have to work with here in Charleston to the future.”

MORE: Learn more about the CW+F festival online. Ticket holders with questions for the festival can email ticketing@charlestonwineandfood.com.