Food and wine to attract tourists

THE LATEST activity to be added to the Barbados tourism calendar is expected to be a major fillip to the island’s tourism.President of Barbados Tourism Authority (BTA), David Rice, anticipates the Barbados Food And Wine Festival planned for November 18 to 21 will be a successful boost to the number of visitors coming into the island.It is the newest addition to the list of annual events in a year in which, according to Rice, the board is concentrating on events.“The tourism industry is a twelve-month a year industry and we can’t just concentrate on our winter season. We have to make sure that in the summer we have business because our responsibility is to 270 000 people. We therefore must have something happening every month of the year.” “This year, over previous years, we are trying to make sure that there is an event every month,”  Rice added. This latest festival joins other mainline festivals like Crop-Over, Gospelfest and the just-concluded ICC World Twenty20 cricket tournament in promoting Barbados  as an activity-filled destination.The Food And Wine Festival, Rice said, is a revamp of the successful Taste Of Barbados in which local chefs showed off their culinary skills and Barbadians took advantage of fine Barbadian cuisine creatively served up. But the BTA president stated, “We took a look at the Taste Of Barbados, which was successful over the years, and we wanted to enhance it.”Chefs from the United States, Canada, the United Kindom and Barbadian chefs will participate in the festival with what Rice described as “very big dining events”, to be held at various locations throughout the island.“We need to draw more visitors to our country, and we wanted to create an international event that could do that.” The BTA president said the Authority was also having discussions about an entertainment event in September. He however declined to give details since he said arrangements had not yet been finalised.