The story
Kuopio Wine Festival in Kuopio
Kuopio Wine Festival, launched in 1997 by tourism director Heikki Kahara and run annually without interruption since 2001, is Finland's largest wine and food festival by attendance and its longest continuously running wine festival, drawing around thirty-five thousand visitors each year to Kuopio's passenger harbor.
Heikki Kahara, Kuopio's tourism director at the time, launched the city's first wine festival under the name Heurigen in 1997, hoping to replicate the German-style Weindorf wine village events that Oulu had established, an ambition Kahara pursued specifically because Oulu itself declined to give up its own wine festival tradition, pushing Kahara to build a comparable event in Kuopio instead.