More to Savor

Natalie Pfister Riha adds libations, pop-up tastings and year-round events to the CB Wine + Food Festival

By Katherine Nettles

Since Natalie Pfister Riha took over as executive director of the CB Wine and Food Festival just two years ago, she has stayed true to her mission of connecting the festival more with Crested Butte’s unique community character. The festival runs July 13-20 and offers more experiences than ever, and as a nod to CB culture, it will include for the first time this year beer-focused events, seminars and even a beer garden at the Grand Tasting on July 19.

Pfister Riha has also expanded the festival beyond the signature week it occupies each July, bringing in smaller events throughout the year and offering a wider range of price points. And she has broadened its scope beyond just fine dining and wine studies. Pfister Riha’s vision is to share more with the Crested Butte community and its gastronomy lovers, to celebrate food and libations of all kinds (even dealcoholized libations), and to be more inclusive of industry professionals.

She was born and raised in Crested Butte, and after living in Chicago, Miami and the Pacific Northwest she moved back to the valley with her own family in 2023.

Pfister Riha was involved in food, wine and events long before she took the helm at the CB Wine and Food Fest. She was also hired as culinary programs manager for the Crested Butte Center for the Arts and recently promoted to program director there, overseeing all major events such as the Mountain Words Festival, concerts, any sort of partnerships and essentially “everything that happens in that building.”

Pfister Riha’s worldly but grounded approach to the food and wine festival, which was founded in 2008 as an annual fundraiser for the Center, may stem from the range of dining experiences she has been a part of and even created over the past two decades throughout the country. 

Born on Vinotok weekend in 1981 to Scott Pfister and Ginny Thomsen, Pfister Riha seems destined for being involved in unique CB celebrations. She says she spent most of her time outdoors as a kid and participated in dance, theatre and the mandatory skiing that comes with so many family lifestyles in the valley. 

Her parents owned Handworks on Elk Avenue, and when they split up her dad retained the store (and still does today) while Pfister Riha and her mom moved closer to their extended family in Miami.  She was 15, halfway through her sophomore year at the Crested Butte Academy in a class of 14 students when she left for Miami. 

After college Pfister came back to Crested Butte for a few years and got her first experience working in restaurants, starting with the Last Steep. “Kevin and Sean Hartigan started my journey in food in a way that has manifested in what I currently do,” she says of the original owners. She also worked at the LoBar, Secret Stash, and McGill’s when it first opened. 

When Pfister Riha went to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she worked at the fine dining restaurant North Pond and began to learn about wine in earnest. She managed Uncommon Ground, a restaurant which cultivated the first certified organic rooftop farm in the U.S. 

Pfister Riha also worked as the events manager for the Google office in Chicago, and started an underground night-time food market in different locations around Chicago to help unlicensed food vendors get a start and save up for the expensive lPlaicenses they needed by hosting it as a private event and charging a $1 admission. “The last one I did had 70 vendors and over 1,000 people,” she says. 

After grad school, Pfister Riha moved with her husband to Seattle with their newborn son Eero, and she began a decade-long stint at the restaurant Delancey. “I really met my people there,” she says, and she filled in there while also working as an art professor at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and after welcoming her second son, Graener. She then helped run a cooking school called The Pantry, which was getting ready to open a second location in 2020 when the pandemic hit. 

Pfister Riha credits the pandemic, terrible as it was, with getting her and her family back to CB.

“We wanted to be somewhere that had a strong community and where we felt like we could contribute. A huge factor was that my dad still lived here, and I knew that I would need to come back at some point, at some capacity, because it turns out parents don’t get younger. And CB ticked all the boxes anyway. It’s a great place to raise kids.”

The family moved to CB in 2023, and Pfister Riha had gotten involved with the Crested Butte Wine and Food Festival after meeting Jillian Liebl, the executive director at the CB Center for the Arts. With her experience in fine dining and having become a sommelier in Seattle, Pfister Riha was a good fit for the position and also became the culinary programs manager for the Center. 

Her idea was to expand the culinary program to be able to offer additional culinary programs throughout the year. “I’d love to be able to work with the local food and wine people to build a culinary community. It’s really important that the CB Wine and Food Festival feels like a community event and contributes to the culinary industry in town,” she says. 

She got started quickly. In 2024 the festival created an industry scholarship for the local service professionals, offering discounted tickets and free seminars. “We are holding our seminars in restaurants in town, so we cross-promote what a rad culinary community we have here,” says Pfister-Riha. 

The Crested Butte Wine and Food Festival already hosts numerous dining experiences, foraging hikes and seminars on various wines and spirits. There will even be a skeet-shooting tournament this year, complete with rosé.  

“We are also expanding our bar takeovers which are where we bring in some sort of expert in something. We have a tequila expert for one of them, a high-level sommelier for another and a wine maker for another. They will do a tasting and offer that as an added experience to everyone at that restaurant, whether you knew it was happening or not,” says Pfister Riha. “So, if you’re going to dine out during the food and wine fest week anyway, this is an added benefit.” 

One such pop-up tasting will be at Soupçon, and one will be at Kochevar’s, says Pfister Riha. “So, in places where you might not expect it. We are really interested in enriching the culinary community in CB. One of the ways we are trying to do that is by saying, we have this festival where we can bring in these high-named people and we can share that with our industry members, the general public, our businesses and be lifting them up too.” 

Additionally, Pfister Riha is bringing in more of one of CB’s favorite staples.

“This is the first year that beer is going to be part of the festival in a very real way,” she says. “We have a beer dinner at Bruhaus and we are bringing three brewers from around the country for that pairing. Then the next day there is a seminar that is all about the history and art of fermentation. Those same brewers are going to break down their process of brewing.”

 At the grand tasting, for the first time ever Pfister Riha says they will have a beer garden, with some regional brewers and some from other areas. There will be a German pretzel vendor there to accompany the suds. 

“It will be a big feature of the grand tasting and I’m pretty excited about that,” says Pfister Riha. “And it’s a big part of what makes us uniquely CB. Frequently a food and wine festival is a little bit hoity toity, and I don’t believe in that and I don’t believe that is true for CB. We can be a CB-style festival which is a little bit quirky and a lot more fun.”

More info and tickets (while available) can be found at:  cbwineandfood.org

Playing Favorites

Natalie Pfister Riha, CB Wine + Food Festival executive director, shares what she is vibing with lately.

Cuisine: 

“Right now in CB particularly I really love the Himilayan food at the Eldo. And I do usually get a beer with it (red ale is my go-to) but if I bring it home I like to pair a Chenin Blanc or an Alsatian Riesling from France with it.” 

Wine + Food Festival event: 

“I really like our field trips.”

Wine: 

“I drink a lot of Grenache Syrah Mourvedre (GSM) and particularly from the Kermit Lynch selections. He was an importer and he would go to France and hand-select these producers. His palette resonates with my palette, so I will often look at the back of a bottle to see if it’s a Kermit Lynch wine.”  Price point range: $17 to $180 on average from retailers.

“I also like Iruai from Northern California. They grow some pretty obscure grapes from the Alsatian border between Switzerland and France. Their wine is weird and funky but also really balanced. They are really beautiful expressions of the grapes they are growing. I would love to bring them to the festival, but those smaller producers are hard to get here due to the expense of travelling all the way here with their wines. Price point range: “Iruai is not a crazy splurge, it can be $30-45 per bottle if you buy from a retailer.”