About this time every year I start to get very excited. My family notices the extra spring in my step and there is a twinkle in my eye rivaling the one Tom Cruise gets when he gets new lifts for his big boy shoes (Tom Cruise short joke #3…ehh thank you very much).
The Epcot Food and Wine Festival is one month away… hallelujah…holy mouse!!! This will be my families 4th year going and I am ret-to-go! My wife first introduced me to the festival and I gotta be honest, I thought it was going to be LAME. “Seriously, a wine festival at Disney World is not my idea of a good time.”, I said. My wife assured me it was fantastic and wasn’t at all what I was expecting it to be. Now I have to be honest, I had never been to Epcot, so I had no basis for my bias. All the years playing in punk bands made me very anti-corporate and tend to make you feel a lot cooler than you really are. I’m here to tell you eager readers the Epcot Food and Wine festival ROCKS YOUR LAME BUTT!
Every country has a sampling of wine and food specific to the region. The cheese booth is really cool because you can go grab yourself a nice wine and pair it with a good cheese ( It’s clearly brie time baby! ). Now I know you beer fans are like, “what about us?”, brew guys and gals you are totally covered. They have beer tents that can cater to your every need. You want a beer from India? Done. Some suds from Norway? Drink up. Now, the common practice is to drink your way through every country. You buy a bracelet drink card, power it up with however much you would like to spend and set out to drink yourself around the world. That being said, nobody likes a drunk guy in pair of Mickey ears puking next to his kid. Don’t be that guy! Take a couple days and really take it all in.
There are some amazing restaurants in Epcot, in fact, I’ve yet to go to one that wasn’t good. There is nothing better than taking the day and really soaking up the culture around you and then ending up at the Biergarten in Germany, downing 1 litre of the Deutschland’s finest ale and tearing into some schnitzel and kraut. Its damn near heaven!
Obviously it’s at Epcot, so it is kid-friendly and you can also catch some pretty good deals with Disney on-site hotel rooms. The best thing about staying on Disney property is you don’t have to drive anywhere. So if you get the chance, put the Epcot Food and Wine festival on your “to-do list” this fall. You’ll be thanking me later.