Planning for the Food and Wine Festival

The festival allows us to try things we normally
wouldn't

Planning ahead of your trip can make or break food and wine. It's true. If you just show up at EPCOT you will most likely wonder around, become overwhelmed by all the options, and end up stopping at every booth. You'll quickly become full, possibly get very tipsy, and you'll spend a lot of money. With this method you most likely won't be able to take full advantage of the festival as you will no longer be interested in eating after a few booths and will most likely miss out on something that sounds absolutely amazing. 

The list of booths and other attractions for the festival is released by Disney in the middle of spring. This will help you to kind of figure out what you may be interested in trying. Each country that is permanently found in the World Showcase will have a booth, keep this in mind as this means you can try cuisine from these countries any time you are at EPCOT. This means that unless you do not frequently travel to Disney or unless they have something incredibly unique on the menu it might be better to avoid these booths and spend your time and money elsewhere.

The prize for completing the cheese crawl

The menus will start to come out in the early summer time frame. This is what you want to pay attention to. The Disney food blog will start to really prepare for this festival at this time. Once the festival opens within a few days the Disney food blog, which is not affiliated with Disney, will have pictures and reviews for nearly every item. They will continually update with changes made and new reviews. Sometimes, there are items that are just not popular. Disney listens and will remove these items and replace them with something else. One example of this was the cheese crawl in 2021. There was a cheesy bread item from France that was a part of the cheese crawl. This item was very polarizing, people either hated it or they loved it. I had decided ahead of time that I wanted to try the cheese crawl, but France was off my list of things to try as all their items were poorly reviewed. I was not looking forward to this item, but figured I'd try it to complete the cheese crawl. By the time our trip cam round, about 3-4 weeks into the festival, that item was removed from the cheese crawl and replaced with something else. This was awesome as I did end up enjoying everything on the cheese crawl and was to claim my prize: a free dessert. We were actually able to cross off several of the booths based on their recommendations, which saved us time, money, and more importable allowed us to try other things. 

A small sampling of the festival offerings

After my first trip, where I had gone over what was there but made no other plans I learned. I had a vague idea of what was there and could kind of remember what I had wanted to try. But, we fell to the allure of all the different options and found ourselves unable to enjoy some of the things we had really wanted to try, but forgot about when we got to the park, because we had filled up on other things. Don't get me wrong, we had a great time. It was a lot of fun to eat and drink with my family, getting tipsy at EPCOT with my grandparents is one of my favorite memories. 

For the second trip I planned. The moment the menus were posted I was there. I was reading all the reviews. I typed out a list of each booth, each item offered at that booth and ranked what I wanted to try. I even put the pricing for each item so I could budget. In the end I had a list of various foods, wines, beers, and mixed drinks that totaled about $360. That's a lot. Keep in mind, Nic and I were going to be sharing all of these items and we were planning on visiting EPCOT multiple times during this trip. Like I said in my other post, I love this festival. 

In the end we tried nearly everything on my list. When we got there we made some changes on the fly, typically because something that sounded awesome when I was planning 3 months prior no longer sounded awesome in 90 degree 100% humidity Florida. Often, we replaced them with other things. In all we still probably spend about $340 at the festival. Planning a head of time helped us a lot. We knew which booths we wanted to hit up and which we wanted to avoid. For example, we knew we did not want to try anything at the mac and cheese or vegetarian themed booths. The menu items sounded great, but we felt our money was better spent at other places. Especially since we ended up hitting up Mexico and Ireland twice, Nic just loved the Guinness milkshake and we both wanted to try everything on the menu at Mexico, which we did. We ended up at EPCOT 3 times, once for a half day where we had dinner through food and wine, once for the entire day where we had lunch and dinner through food and wine, and once just stopping by for another Guinness milkshake. We had a park hopper pass so why not? 

That Guinness shake

Back to budgeting. It was a bit surprising that we had a must try list of $360. And that was after I went back and moved some things from my 'I'd like to try this' list to the 'if we try this we try this' list. Still that was a pretty large amount. In fact my parents thought it was hilarious. But, this is something Nic and I are interested in so we were fine with it. Before the trip we had purchased gift cards, I think most people know that Costco often has a deal where you can get $150 worth of Disney gift cards for $145. This saved us a bit of money, thank you Costco. We linked a credit card to our magic bands, paid with our magic bands each time we got something, and then used our gift cards to pay the balance at the hotel concierge desk. In the end only $100 or so was charged on my credit card for the entire trip. Personally, I've found that to be the best way for us. Some people like to pay directly with the gift cards and when they're gone they're done. If that works for you go for it. I personally, liked knowing that I could do what I wanted and had the ease of using my magic band to pay. 

The bottom line is if you know you will be sampling the offering of the food and wine festival you should plan ahead. Having an idea of what will be there and how much you will spend will make the trip more enjoyable. You won't feel pressured to stop by every booth or try something from every place.