What to Expect at the JEPF Food & Wine Festival

The Food & Wine Festival is our flagship event, and the honest description of it is that it is a Caribbean food and wine festival run by people from that community for that community, with the proceeds going to education for at-risk young people in Jamaica.

The food is the centre of it. Our chefs are the reason people come back, and Taste of Jamaica, which started as its own event and has run eleven times, now also appears as a booth at the larger festivals. If you have been to a Caribbean festival where the food was an afterthought, this is not that.

Wine is taken more seriously than the word festival usually implies. So is the music. These have been live-music events from the beginning, and the lineup is a real lineup rather than a sound system in a corner.

It is a family crowd, deliberately. That has been the character of these events for years and it is the thing we protect hardest. Some years children under twelve have got in free and parking has been free. Whether that applies to a given event is on that event's ticket page.

On dates: upcoming festivals are published on our events page as soon as they are confirmed, and if you would rather be told than keep checking, leave your details on the festival page and we will email you when tickets open.

What your ticket pays for is not decorative. It funds books and school supplies, scholarships, mentoring and leadership development, and it goes toward the permanent leadership training center JEPF is raising funds to build in Jamaica. Our officers take no salary, so ticket revenue is not paying anybody here.

If you want to be more involved than attending: businesses can sponsor the festival, and events this size run on volunteers. Setup, guest services, vendor support and breakdown are all real jobs and all genuinely useful, and volunteering at an event is the easiest way into this foundation if you are not sure where you fit.