Wine lovers along the Gulf Coast have another reason to celebrate this month as the 5th annual Wharf Uncorked Food and Wine Festival returns to The Wharf in Orange Beach from Thursday, Sept. 13, through Saturday, Sept. 15. The three-day event brings together local musical talent, more than 100 wine labels, celebrity book signings and a luxury yacht walk, along with silent auctions benefiting Make-A-Wish Alabama.
Now in its fifth year, Wharf Uncorked has grown into one of the Alabama Gulf Coast’s signature culinary events, drawing visitors from across the region to sample the area’s growing food and beverage scene while supporting a statewide charity. What began as a single-weekend addition to The Wharf’s events calendar has become a fixture of the late-summer shoulder season, filling the gap between the height of the beach season and the fall convention calendar.
The Wharf itself, with its marina, amphitheater, restaurants, and retail streets, provides the kind of compact walkable setting that food and wine festivals need. Attendees can park once and spend an evening moving between tasting venues, stages, and the waterfront, which is part of why the festival has scaled up so successfully in its first five years.
Thursday Night: The Chef Showdown
The festival kicks off Thursday evening with a VIP kickoff party and Chef Showdown, featuring high-end wine tastings, small plates and an open bar with a signature cocktail from Opelika’s John Emerald Distillery. The inclusion of an Alabama craft distillery in the opening-night pour reflects the state’s growing craft spirits scene, and the signature cocktail has become a fixture of the kickoff party’s bar service.
The night’s centerpiece is a cooking competition pitting reigning champion Chef Chris Kelley against three local chefs for bragging rights over the best Alabama Gulf seafood dish. Head-to-head cooking competitions have become a crowd favorite at Gulf Coast festivals, and the format gives local chefs a stage on which to show off the region’s signature ingredient: fresh Gulf seafood straight from the docks that still operate along the Alabama coast.
Kelley enters the event as the chef to beat, holding the title from the previous year’s showdown. Defending champions face a unique pressure in these contests, since challengers arrive with specific plans to unseat them and the audience knows exactly who the reigning kingpin is. Tickets for the VIP kickoff and Chef Showdown are $45.
Friday: Wine Dinners at the Wharf’s Restaurants
Friday shifts the focus to an evening of wine dinners, with several of The Wharf’s on-property restaurants offering curated menus paired with wine selections. Guests are encouraged to make reservations directly with the restaurant of their choice ahead of time, as offerings vary by venue.
Wine dinners occupy a different space in the festival lineup than the big public tastings. Each dinner pairs a multi-course menu with selected wines, usually poured and discussed by a representative of the winery or the restaurant’s own sommelier or manager, and the smaller format allows for a level of detail and conversation that a festival crowd cannot accommodate. For the restaurants, the dinners are a showcase for their kitchens during a weekend when food-minded visitors fill the property.
Variety is the practical benefit for attendees. Because each participating restaurant designs its own menu and wine pairings, no two dinners are alike, and repeat festivalgoers often plan their Friday around which venue they have not yet tried. The reservation requirement also keeps each dinner intimate, and guests who wait until the festival weekend to book frequently find seats limited.
Saturday: The Grand Tasting on Main Street
The festival wraps up Saturday, Sept. 15, with a Grand Tasting presented by Rouses Markets. Main Street and Wharf Parkway will serve as the festival’s entertainment district, with vendors pouring wine, beer and spirits throughout the area.
Rouses Markets, the Gulf South grocery chain with deep roots in Louisiana and a growing presence along the Alabama and Mississippi coasts, brings its name to the festival’s largest single event. The company’s sponsorship fits its positioning as the region’s source for wine and specialty foods, and its involvement has helped the Grand Tasting grow into the weekend’s centerpiece.
More than a dozen local restaurants will compete for the People’s Choice Award, giving festivalgoers the chance to sample small bites and vote for their favorites while watching chef and mixology demonstrations at the Rouses Markets Culinary Experience Stage. The People’s Choice format puts the judging in the hands of the crowd, which changes how restaurants approach the competition: winning requires a dish that pleases hundreds of tasters, not a panel of experts.
The Culinary Experience Stage adds a scheduled program to Saturday’s tasting floor, with demonstrations running through the afternoon. Chef demonstrations give attendees a reason to linger between tastings and a chance to pick up techniques and recipes from the same kitchens competing on the festival floor. Mixology segments extend the program beyond food into cocktails, reflecting the breadth of the beverage industry the festival covers.
Grand Tasting tickets are $70, while a combination package covering the Grand Tasting, VIP kickoff and Chef Showdown is available for $100. The combo package represents a substantial saving over buying the two headline events separately, and it is aimed at the out-of-town visitors who make Wharf Uncorked a full weekend trip. Tickets can be purchased online through Ticketmaster or in person at The Wharf box office.
Yachts, Authors, and a Statewide Charity
Beyond the food and drink, the festival includes book signings by chefs and authors James Briscione and Brooke Pankhurst, along with a luxury yacht walk for attendees interested in browsing high-end vessels docked along The Wharf’s marina.
Briscione brings serious credentials to the signing table. A two-time Food Network champion who trained at the Culinary Institute of America, he has built a national profile as a cookbook author and culinary educator, and his appearances at Gulf Coast food events have drawn lines of home cooks and food fans. The book signings add a personal, meet-the-author dimension to a festival otherwise organized around tastings and demonstrations.
The yacht walk takes advantage of The Wharf’s marina, one of the largest on the Alabama coast. Attendees can stroll the docks and board or browse vessels that rarely open to the public, a draw for boat enthusiasts and curious festivalgoers alike. The marina is a working part of The Wharf’s year-round operation, hosting transient boaters traveling the Intracoastal Waterway, and during the festival it doubles as a showroom.
Proceeds from the event’s silent auctions go toward supporting Make-A-Wish Alabama and its work granting wishes to children with critical illnesses across the state. The charity partnership has been a foundation of the festival’s identity, giving the weekend a mission beyond entertainment and giving attendees a direct way to contribute through auction bids placed across the festival grounds.
For Orange Beach, the festival’s September slot delivers a welcome economic boost. The week after Labor Day traditionally marks a dip in Gulf Coast tourism, and events like Wharf Uncorked bring overnight visitors into restaurants, hotels, and shops during a period that would otherwise be quiet. Five years in, the festival has become part of the city’s late-summer identity, a weekend when the food and wine crowd joins the beach crowd along the Alabama coast.
The three-day structure gives the festival its rhythm, and each night serves a different kind of attendee. Thursday belongs to the food-obsessed, the VIP crowd that wants a front-row seat to the Chef Showdown and first crack at the weekend’s rare wines. Friday is for couples and small groups who prefer a seated, guided experience at a single restaurant. Saturday is the big communal day, when the streets fill, the restaurants compete, and the festival reaches its peak energy.
Local musical talent runs through the weekend as well, with performers playing to the festival crowd across the property. Live music has become a standard feature of Gulf Coast food events, and The Wharf’s open-air layout allows musicians to reach audiences spread across the entertainment district without requiring a separate ticketed concert.
The more than 100 wine labels available across the weekend represent the festival’s core attraction. Tastings are spread across the three days and multiple venues, giving attendees the chance to work through varietals and regions they might never buy by the bottle. For the wine industry, festivals like this one are a direct line to Gulf Coast consumers in a market that has grown steadily as the region’s population and restaurant scene have expanded.
That growth is visible across the coast. Baldwin County’s beach communities have added upscale dining, craft cocktail programs, and wine-focused retailers at a rapid pace over the past decade, driven by the influx of full-time residents and repeat visitors. Wharf Uncorked both reflects that maturation and accelerates it, since local restaurants and distributors use the festival to introduce themselves to an audience of dedicated food and wine travelers.
The silent auction tables tie the whole weekend to its charitable mission. Make-A-Wish Alabama grants wishes to children with critical illnesses across the state, from theme park trips to meet-a-hero experiences, and each wish carries a substantial average cost covered by donations and events like this one. Festival organizers have made the partnership a headline element of the event’s promotion, and attendees browsing the auctions across the weekend are contributing directly to the organization’s work.
By Saturday night, the fifth annual edition closes with the People’s Choice winner announced, the final auction bids tallied, and the entertainment district winding down for another year. The festival’s growth from a first-year experiment to one of the Alabama Gulf Coast’s signature culinary weekends took just five years, and its combination of chef competitions, wine tastings, yacht tours, and charity auctions has proven a durable formula for the September shoulder season.