Naples Winter Wine Festival vintners discuss the 2023 event

The Naples Winter Wine Festival is in full swing. WINK News anchor Lindsey Sablan sat down with vintners to discuss this year’s event.

This is truly a story of when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. One of the cohosts of Friday evening’s dinner had her home destroyed by Hurricane Ian, so they had to devise plan B.

Plan B was a private hangar at the Naples airport.

The sound of a plane is not one you’re used to hearing during dinner, but nothing is usual during a vintner dinner for the Naples Winter Wine Festival.

“Our intent is to build enthusiasm and excitement for tomorrow’s auction,” said Tom Koehn.

Tom and Linda Koehn are trustees, basically donors, for the festival. Part of their job is to host a private dinner for about a dozen festival attendees the night before Saturday’s auction.

“Marilyn Scripps’ home, where we were to have the event, was destroyed,” said Linda Koehn.

They bounced back, and then some with the new location. Behind the hangar doors, an immersive experience thanks to a local vendor, Artistic Science.

“We decided the best thing to do was to take our guests on a journey,” said Tom Martin, with Artistic Science.

Guests had a 360 view that started with an airport, then “We’re going to go to Japan, Egypt, we got Paris,” said Martin.

Six projectors set the scenes that took the entire week to build.

“This is the best dinner we’ve ever been a part of.”

You can’t forget about the beautiful table, fantastic food, and of course, wine. Even the event planner was thoughtful about who to hire post-Hurricane Ian.

05:18:25 “We wanted to use local people that may or may not have lost their job, or an opportunity or got laid off, so we chose specially to find locals that we could help support,” said Trent Ryan, with Margaret Events.

Bringing people together from all over to raise money for the children.