Salinas Valley Food & Wine Festival cancelled in 2025, volunteers needed for next year
Jeanette Bent
SALINAS, Calif. (KION-TV) — Another Central Coast festival is hitting the breaks this year. Although not canceled completely, the Salinas Valley Food and Wine Festival will be postponed because of financial hardships and a lack of helping hands.
“People think of lettuce and strawberries and artichokes, but I mean wine, you just look around, a lot of fields have turned to vineyards,” said Sean Laughingtree
The golden crop is what Sean, who works at an antique store in Salinas, calls grapes that grow on the central coast.
“Wine, growing of grapes has been an integral part, like a huge part of our agriculture now,” said Laughingtree.
The Salinas Valley Food and Wine Festival was a celebration of that crop, bringing in regional and local wine vendors.
Business owner Frank Savino says, beyond the buzz, the festival brings foot traffic and funds for local causes.
“The beauty of having it downtown is getting, you know, a thousand plus people to walk past your business in a four or five hour period,” said Savino
“We like donating the profit to the local community. We do education, agriculture. We have scholarships.”
One of the main organizers of the event, Joel Panzer, says there’s a slew of reasons the festival isn’t happening this year.
“The first one is just volunteer fatigue. As I mentioned, for the past six years, the core group has been putting on the festival. And we’ve been unable to recruit new volunteers from the community, our prices have really increased quite a bit over the last few years to produce it, the third dynamic is this year alone, I would say there’s probably $20,000 to $25,000 worth of corporate sponsorships or sponsorships that we know are not gonna come through,” said Joel Panzer, Organizer for the Salinas Valley Food and Wine Festival.
Panzer adds that the cost to hold the event is over 60 thousand dollars and relies on those sponsors.
Sean says he understands the reasoning behind the pause as an event organizer himself, and says postponing was the right choice if it means protecting the festival’s reputation.
“To not have enough volunteers to do that, people, I think, would go away with a really bad feeling and maybe not return the next year,” said Laughingtree.
While Panzer assures the festival will come back next year, a big question remains of if the event will remain in Old Town Salinas.
“That we don’t know we explored other options, and what we’re hearing the consistent feedback was people want it to be downtown,” said Panzer.
Some possible future venues Joel mentioned are the fairgrounds and the sheriff’s posse ground, but is working to keep it here in Old Town.
For more information about plans for the Salinas Valley Food and Wine Festival, visit salinasvalleyfoodandwine.com.