Portland Wine Week organizers recently announced their plans to put the seven-year-old festival on hold this year so the small team behind the festival can focus on other Portland-based wine events throughout the year.

Portland Wine Week celebrates local food, restaurants and the city’s diverse selection of quality wine in a weeklong series of wine-pairing meals, tastings and “wine sails” on the 74-foot sailboat Frances. Festival founder and organizer Erica Archer said programming for the popular event had grown by between 20% and 35% each year since its inception in 2018.

But the festival was taking focus and energy away from Archer’s wine-based local events company, Wine Wise, which uses the same six to eight staffers as Portland Wine Week. So she and her team decided to “pause” Wine Week this year and redirect their full efforts to Wine Wise.

“At the heart of our conversation is, how can we best contribute to the Portland culinary community,” Archer said. “When we asked ourselves that question in 2018, the answer was, ‘Let’s put on a huge festival.’ This year when we asked ourselves, it was a really hard look at what we were sacrificing.

“Running a major festival is no small undertaking,” she continued. “It could really use its own team working on it year-round. My team can’t even start to pay attention to it until Jan. 1, and then it’s a sprint.”

Wine Wise events, which used to be contained to 19 weeks during the heart of the season, are now running year-round. Archer said they’ve already expanded programming, like restarting their Wine & Food Walks that were on pause since March 2020, which feature a tour of four local restaurants with wine and food pairings and talks with the chefs at each stop.

Archer said she and her team haven’t ruled out Portland Wine Week returning in 2026. “We’re going to see how this year goes before we have that conversation,” she said. “We’ll reassess come the end of our busy season.”