EUGENE, Ore. – The seventh annual Oregon Truffle Festival Marketplace returns on Sunday, Jan. 27, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hilton Eugene & Conference Center in Eugene. The Marketplace features a stunning array of Oregon wines, artisan foods and wild-crafted products and services related to the burgeoning truffle industry. This culinary tasting marketplace caps off the one-of-a-kind, three-day Oregon Truffle Festival (OTF). All Weekend Experiences and the Grand Truffle Dinner are sold out.

Marketplace admission is $15 at the door and includes truffle tastings and access to a wide variety of artisan foods for sampling and purchase. The event features three truffle cooking demonstrations, tastings by local chefs, a truffle dog demonstration, dog harvested fresh truffles for sale and a lecture series. A $20 ticket includes wine tastings featuring eight of Oregon’s outstanding wineries.

“The Marketplace is a celebration of Oregon’s artisanal foods, our unsurpassed wines, and the authentic experience of native Oregon truffles, fresh from their source,” said Leslie Scott, Oregon Truffle Festival managing partner.

Returning gourmet food purveyors include:

More than a dozen new artisan purveyors will join the 2013 Marketplace to offer a taste of Oregon’s truffle bounty.

Local winemakers this year include perennial favorites as well as several highly acclaimed small producers whose wines are rarely available for tasting. A complete list of all represented winemakers can be found on the festival website.

The Marketplace lecture series will feature a special weekend guest, Bay area author and master forager Connie Green, showing slides and speaking about her beautiful book which lent its name to the festival, The Wild Table. 

The lecture series also features a special appearance by Karen Brooks, who has been cooking up opinions on Portland’s food scene for over 20 years. Her reviews were the first to recognize and bring attention to the genius of young, obsessive Rose City chefs. Considered the defining food voice of the city, she will read from her new book The Mighty Gastropolis: Portland A Journey Through the Center of America’s New Food Revolution.  As a former guitarist in an alternative rock band, Brooks has identified with Portland’s thriving retinue of culinary experimentalists, gastro-archaeologists, pork-obsessed roasters, and chefs with an edge. 

Both Green and Brooks, along with Cole Danehower, author of Essential Wines and Wineries of, will be on hand to sign their books, available for purchase at the Marketplace.

For more information on the Oregon Truffle Festival and on the Sunday Marketplace, visit www.oregontrufflefestival.com.

Now in its eighth year, the Oregon Truffle Festival is the only event of its kind in North America and showcases a truly unique culinary treasure. Oregon plays a key role in the growing international truffle industry, through both the focal point provided by the Oregon Truffle Festival, and through decades of research on truffles at Oregon State University (OSU). Many of the world’s most successful truffle researchers and farmers received their graduate and postdoctoral training at OSU, including Dr. Charles Lefevre, festival co-founder and owner of New World Truffieres. For more information visit http://www.oregontrufflefestival.com

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Maralyn D. Hill