A Passion for All Things Culinary
Watershed designs, produces and markets events that promote culinary and artisan food/beverage products. Fueled by our passion for getting national attention for regional cuisine, we love the challenges of drawing people together to enjoy the bounty.
Watershed founded the Portland Indie Wine Festival in 2005 with the goal of sustaining the biodiversity of the craft wine industry in Oregon. It is the signature event of the Indie Wine Foundation, a newly formed non-profit dedicated to sustaining and preserving the art of craft winemaking. This annual event is a delicious experience that pairs wine lovers with Oregon's top 40 artisanal wineries in the heart of Portland.
Designed as a competition similar to the Sundance Film Festival, the Portland Indie Wine Festival is the only juried festival of its kind in the United States and for most people, the only chance to experience off-the-map wineries all at once. Watershed has generated $5 million in media value for the event and has created a cottage industry of brokers and urban wineries, bringing national media and winemakers to Oregon every March to judge the event. Media coverage includes Saveur Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, epicurious.com, and the Los Angeles Times.
Watershed was challenged to encourage Seattle consumers to attend the Deschutes Brewery Neighborhood Hops Traveling Beer Festival, a series of four local beer festival events, as well as to build the travelling barrel as an identifiable brand icon. Watershed created specialized media lists for calendar listings, invited influential Seattle food, lifestyle and beverage writers to attend preview appearances of the traveling Deschutes barrel, and created a variety of interesting story angles about charity partners, music performers, artisanal food producers and beer lovers. Media coverage included three unique mentions in the Seattle Times, as well as stories in The Stranger, Queen Anne News, Citysearch.com, Draft Magazine, Beer Northwest and King 5 Morning News.
