Rhody represented at Vermont food festival

I was invited to Stowe, Vermont to broadcast from the Stowe Wine and Food Classic, a festival of wine and foods to be paired by chefs, winemakers and purveyors from throughout the culinary world. The headliners were nationally known winemakers and chefs who joined their colleagues based in the Green Mountain State to dazzle the crowd with their creations. The pairings were expert, even artistic. What I found most impressive was that two of the primary artists were from Rhode Island. One is a leading Providence restaurateur, the other an up-and-coming chef who helped launch two restaurants in the Ocean State between stints up north in ski country.
The event brought top winemakers and chefs headlined by the founder of Ravenswood Winery, Joel Peterson, one of the leading producers of Zinfandel wine in the world, and his son, Morgan Twain Peterson, who founded his own winery, Bedrock Wine Co.
The Wine and Food Classic was held at the Trapp Family Lodge, perched on its own mountaintop in the shadow of Mount Mansfield. The executive chef at Trapp is Kim Lambrechts, who recently returned to Vermont from two executive-chef positions in Rhode Island. Lambrechts was executive chef, as well as food-and-beverage director at Forty One North in Newport and the Stone House in Little Compton. His time in our state had an influence on his cooking, as we would see.
Before cooking in Newport County, Lambrechts served as food & beverage director at Stowe Mountain Lodge, just up the mountain road from our weekend festival location. Of course in Vermont, everything is just up or down the road.
Opening the festival, which was held over the first weekend of the summer season, was a familiar Providence chef. Matt Jennings conducted a tasting of the cheeses of Vermont and a pairing not with wine but with local craft beer. The two-time James Beard-nominated chef left Farmstead, his artisan boutique, and its adjacent La Laiterie bistro, for the weekend to return to the Green Mountains. “Vermont and I have a long history together,” said Jennings on my radio show. “I spent time here as a kid and went to culinary school at the New England Culinary Institute just down the road in Montpelier. My wife is originally from Vermont so it feels like home whenever I come back here.”
Jennings is a frequent visitor for more than just family reunions. He visits the state regularly to talk and taste cheese with the farmers and producers, who are ever-increasing in number in Vermont. “I think the foundation of our business was built by the cheese-maker-farmers of this state,” he declared.
Jennings recalled the products of many of those farms made up the opening inventory at Farmstead. “We began by sourcing from all these amazing, small family farms, of which there are now over 40.” Jennings says cheese-making in the Green Mountain State has entered a renaissance.
The chef and cheese-monger, as he likes to be called, took the opportunity of his pairing demonstration to spotlight another growth segment of the food-and-beverage community in Vermont, that of craft-beer brewing. Indeed, the host venue for the festival got into the beer- brewing business in 2010.
The Trapp Family Brewery took over what had been the Austrian Tea Room across from the main lodge. The vice president of the von Trapp family business, Sam von Trapp, grandson of Maria and the captain from “Sound of Music” fame – calls the brewery modest. Approximately 60,000 gallons of Austrian-style lager are brewed annually.
The new breed of Vermont brewers takes their craft very seriously. One brew master who is also a chef at a new restaurant in Stowe installed a water-filtration system that can adjust mineral content to replicate virtually any water source in the world. “I think beer and cheese pairings are frequently better than wine and cheese!” Matt Jennings declared, as he took the stage in one of the billowing tents housing the festival. Jennings was eagerly anticipating pairing microbrews with cheese from one of what he calls “micro-dairies.” Sage Dairy in Stowe makes goat’s milk cheese by hand that Jennings was planning to pair with a local lager that has become the toast of the resort pubs as the summer season got under way. The beer, called Heady Topper, is a Double IPA-golden ale with a strong hoppy taste, equally strong, foamy head and notes of citrus brewed by the Alchemist brewery, just “up the road” in nearby Waterbury.
Dining out in Vermont puts the emphasis on locally sourced foods, which are found throughout the Green Mountain State in ample measure. The chef-scene in the state mirrors the burgeoning farm-to-table movement in our own Rhode Island restaurants.
The foodies in attendance that I talked to admire our food culture, particularly our seafood, as was evidenced by chef Albrecht’s menu for the festival’s gala dinner. Under the stars on the mountaintop, along with applewood smoked-pork tenderloin, the hills were alive with Atlantic halibut and lobster, paired with Joel Peterson’s 2009 Ravenswood Zinfandel and the younger Peterson’s Bedrock Heirloom, a Zinfandel-Syrah blend.
Rhode Island seafood and California wines made a perfect pairing for a Vermont weekend. •


Bruce Newbury’s food and wine talk radio show is heard Saturdays and Sundays locally on WPRV-AM 790, on radio throughout New England and on the Stitcher mobile application. He can be reached by email at bruce@brucenewbury.com.

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