Texas Reds Festival
Texas
A steak and wine festival in downtown Bryan once pulled twenty thousand people from eighteen states and four countries, then quietly vanished.
Every October for thirteen years, downtown Bryan filled up with barbecue smoke and grape stomping. The Texas Reds Steak and Grape Festival started in 2007. Wine tasting, culinary exhibitions, live music. Jerry Jeff Walker headlined the second one. Robert Earl Keen and Earl Thomas Conley played in 2009, the year more than twenty thousand people showed up, coming from eighteen different states and four countries. The tenth anniversary came around in 2017 with twenty-five vendors and happy crowds. Then the pandemic hit and the city council called off the 2020 event. They called off 2021 too. The fourteenth festival got pushed to 2022, and then Destination Bryan announced it was over for good. The reasons were plain enough. The planning took enormous hours, and hotel bookings tied to the festival had been sliding.
Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.
The 2009 event was attended by over 20,000 people from 18 different states and four countries.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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