I attended my first Food & Wine Classic in 2013, not long 
after moving to Colorado from Portland, Oregon, where I had spent a decade working as a magazine editor, writer, and journalist. 
As a Pacific Northwest-based freelancer, one of my regular and most satisfying gigs had been writing profiles of the region’s James Beard Award-winning chefs for Food & Wine magazine. So in June 2013, I scored a media pass to the Classic not so much for the novelty (and hilarity) of sampling Grant Achatz’s green apple taffy helium balloons, which were a hit that year, but for a chance to finally meet Dana Cowin, F&W’s editor in chief from 1995 to 2016, who had been my editor. For the life of me I cannot recall what was said during my brief audience with Cowin. But I vividly remember how white the tents appeared against the cloudless blue sky in June and the backdrop of Ajax with its meadows of verdant green, how fabulous, and fortunate, I felt to be there, not necessarily at the Classic, but in Aspen at the cusp of summer. 

“Ask 30 participants about the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen and you’ll get 30 wildly varying, occasionally intersecting accounts of what it’s like to be a part of this legendary 40-year-old food festival,” is how Food & Wine prefaces its oral history commemorating the Classic’s 40th anniversary this summer. “Since 1983, hundreds of the biggest names in the food, wine, and hospitality business have converged at this annual event to celebrate, network, commingle, educate, and serve the thousands of lucky attendees who find themselves in the rarefied Colorado air of Snowmass and Aspen Mountain for the culinary adventure of a lifetime.”

As one of dozens of food and wine industry icons the magazine tapped for its oral history of the Classic (including Aspenite Jimmy Yaeger), Cowin recalls a 2010 Châteauneuf-du-Pape seminar by the Food Network’s Justin Warner: “Justin came out wearing papal robes and literally rapped all about like, what is Châteauneuf, what is the grape, what is the wine? It was hip-hop, it was hysterical and informative, and I was like, oh, this is it.”

Six years after leaving F&W,  Cowin launched a ’zine and podcast, Speaking Broadly, celebrating women in the food world. At around the same time, I became edtior of this magazine. Perhaps subconsciously following the lead of my F&W mentor, I chose to open this issue’s At Altitude section with contributing editor Tess Weaver’s account about a boomlet of female-owned ranches and farms that are driving the Roaring Fork Valley’s locally grown and harvested food movement (“Bumper Crop”). In a similar vein, I asked food journalist Amanda Faison to pen a short profile of Mawa McQueen, who, a year after being nominated for a James Beard Award for her groundbreaking eponymous Aspen restaurant opened a satellite in Snowmass, and an incubator space at the ABC to bootstrap local culinary entrepreneurs in her image (“Success Story”). This issue also debuts food writer Amanda Rae’s deftly executed update of the valley’s most comprehensive guide to 170 restaurants that, in its breadth and depth, attests to a mountain town dining scene that rivals big-city culinary epicenters. 

As Cowin puts it in F&W’s oral history: “Babies were made in Aspen, marriages are made in Aspen, partnerships are made in Aspen, deals are made in Aspen. Part of it is the proximity. Everyone’s traversing the same 10 blocks and eating in the same, whatever, 20 restaurants. It is like the best set for a play where the most famous actors are just hanging out and living on the set with you, and you can go up and talk to them.” 

Classic Aspen: Living the dream.

Ted Katauskas
Editor in Chief