This Sold-Out Oregon Food & Wine Festival Is Heading To NYC —Here’s Why That Matters

The return to analog gathering is reshaping which food and wine events actually work. Lois Cho’s AAPI Food & Wine sold out three years running in Oregon and coming to NYC—offers a case study in why.

In 2023, Lois Cho — a former nurse practitioner and cofounder of Cho Wines with zero festival experience — sold out a thousand-person food and wine event in Oregon’s Dundee Hills in two months. Established Valley events struggled to fill seats, but hers had a waitlist. It sold out again the following year, and then again the year after that.

This March, AAPI Food & Wine lands in New York City for the first time. James The lineup includes James Beard winners, master sommeliers, and Willamette Valley winemakers. Yet it has an origin story that points to something deeper: the infrastructure Cho needed didn’t exist, so she built it herself.

What’s drawing people isn’t the programming. It’s what happens when you stop scrolling and walk into a room where the invitation is real.

“Everything is so digitalized, there’s an excess of everything all the time,” Cho says. “You can get whatever you want, all the time, but that’s not what you want. You want connection. You want a story. You want to feel connected to something, someone, to experience something more tangible and meaningful in a world where I feel like we’re losing meaning.”

Why we’re craving connection over content

Cho’s success isn’t an anomaly but a case study in a broader market shift toward an emotional economy, where trust and connection function as currency and showing up matters more than ease.

The numbers bear this out. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z believe in-person experiences matter more than digital ones, and almost half want events that feel less curated and more real, according to Eventbrite’s 2026 Social Study. After years of performative gathering, the Instagrammable backdrops and content-ready moments, people are seeking something different.

The data reveals a paradox: nearly 25% of 18-to-29-year-olds report feeling lonely, yet 79% plan to attend more events this year. They’re not withdrawing. They’re looking for rooms that feel different from the ones that haven’t worked.

Eventbrite calls it the “Reset to Real,” a move away from passive attendance toward active participation. The report found that nearly nine in ten young adults want events that connect them to their community, and most are more likely to attend when a cause they care about is involved.

What Cho built by instinct, the data now confirms: the gatherings that stick aren’t optimized for reach, but designed for presence.

Building the infrastructure that didn’t exist

Cho came to wine sideways, through her husband Dave, who was the one with the passion project. She was a nurse practitioner with no interest in joining him, but a move back to California changed the calculation. “If you still want to make Oregon wine,” she told him, “how can I help?”

She helped with compliance, then social media, then everything else. CHO Wines launched in 2020 with 700 cases. By 2024, they’d grown to 7,000 and opened a tasting room in the Willamette Valley, becoming the first Korean American winemakers in Oregon.

The arc completed itself unexpectedly when, in early 2023, a food photographer friend suggested a potluck for AAPI Heritage Month: invite some Asian American chefs from Portland, pair it with CHO wines, and take some photos.

Cho thought about it for a few days. Then: “What if we just invited everyone? Like, why just limit it to our friend group? What if we just did an event?”

Two months later, she’d taught herself how to throw a festival, made the website, created all the content, and designed everything herself. A thousand people showed up.

The emotional weight of a real invitation

What Cho didn’t anticipate was how much it would move people.

“We didn’t realize the emotional impact it would have on people,” she says. “Multiple times throughout that first event, people were walking up to me, holding me. Like, ‘Lois. Lois.’ Something you can’t really verbalize.”

One attendee was a physician Cho had worked with during her nurse practitioner days, a Japanese American woman who had watched the whole journey from medical career to winery to this. She found Cho at the festival, eyes brimming with tears.

“’Lois, this is so beautiful.’ Because, you know, a lot of people who you connect with on a daily basis — they don’t understand why you’re so passionate about wine. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool you do wine, it’s not something I’m really into.’ There’s a certain idea of what wine is. Then you create this event, and they come in and experience it — it’s so different from just visually seeing it on Instagram.”

Cho is building more than an annual event. The festival now includes Wine 101 sessions, free educational programming for AAPI restaurant workers and chefs who want to start wine programs but don’t know where to begin.

The origin was practical: when CHO Wines entered distribution, Asian American restaurants started reaching out, excited to carry a brand that felt like theirs, many with no wine background.

“I get texts regularly from chefs who are starting a wine bar or a wine program and they have no idea where to start,” Cho says. “The Wine 101 came from that — bridging that gap, having a safe space for folks to be able to learn.”

The stories that were always there

When asked “why New York, why now,” Cho points to a through-line she’s still uncovering. She was challenged to find the connection between Oregon, where the festival returns to McMinnville in May, and New York. What emerged was a pattern bigger than any single place. In McMinnville, a hidden Chinese gathering space from the early 1900s was recently uncovered beneath the Old Elks Lodge, a reminder of what AAPI communities made here and of stories that have long existed beneath the surface.

“On a bigger scale, we really don’t talk about that part of heritage,” Cho says. “After the Chinese Exclusion Act, that history sort of disappeared.”

Taking the festival national means bringing the space for that reclamation with it. “It’s for everyone,” she says. “A celebration of our culture and our experience, open to everyone to come and experience. We want people to see the wine country we know and love — we just see it from a different lens.”

What the New York expansion looks like

The lineup runs March 19 through 21. Three days, three events, each centered on connection rather than consumption. NA:EUN Hospitality, the team behind Michelin-starred Atomix (recently named No. 1 on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list), anchors the programming.

• Opening Night (March 19): Hana Makgeolli, Brooklyn. Peter Cho of Han Oak with Alice Jun and CHO Wines. Korean American makers, fermentation culture, traditional-method sparkling alongside Korean rice wines.
• Collaboration Dinner (March 20): Atoboy, Manhattan. Langbaan’s Earl Ninsom, JinJu Patisserie’s Kyurim Lee and Jin Caldwell, and AAPI winemakers including Dr. Madaiah Revana, Renée St-Amour of Hundred Suns, and Sashi Moorman of Evening Land.
• Tastemaker Tour (March 21): Naro at Rockefeller Center, Manhattan. Walk-around tasting with an industry session for wine professionals seeking community.

“Our goal remains the same: to create meaningful spaces where AAPI voices lead the conversation in food and wine,” Cho says. “New York City represents a powerful next chapter, rooted in honoring the stories that connect our communities coast to coast.”

What if we just invited everyone

That was the question Cho asked herself before the first festival, and it’s the same one driving the New York expansion. “If you create a gathering that speaks to people’s values, it speaks to the core of their being, they will show up,” she says. When everything is accessible and very little sticks, the gatherings that work are the ones made for depth not reach. Wine is the vehicle, and connection is the point.

AAPI Food & Wine: NYC runs March 19 through 21, 2026. Tickets are available through OpenTable Experiences.