About Us

The 6th Annual Lost Colony Wine, Beer & Culinary Festival will be held Saturday, April 13th, 2024 with the Grand Tasting, on the beautiful and historic grounds of the Waterside Theatre on Roanoke Island. The venue is home to America’s longest running outdoor symphonic drama The Lost Colony.

Roanoke Island is the site of America’s first English colony to arrive in the New World in 1587. The colonists’ disappearance has never been solved and remains our country’s oldest mystery. It is also the birthplace of America’s first English child, Virginia Dare.

The only silent witness remaining to these events is the Mother Vine, America’s oldest cultivated grapevine. Dated to be more than 400 years old, its myths and history is interwoven with the Colonists and Virginia Dare, and the story of American wine. At the Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival, Old World wine and New World wine is celebrated on the site where Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists discovered the New World and its abundance of “grapes of such greatness, yet wild, that France, Spain nor Italy hath not greater.”

The Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival is a fundraising event produced by the Roanoke Island Historical Association, a 501 3(c) non-profit whose mission is to commemorate the history of the first English colonies in North America on Roanoke Island, NC – primarily accomplished by the annual production of its symphonic outdoor drama, The Lost Colony, and through educationally engaging events and programs. All funds raised from The Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival will benefit The Lost Colony production.

 

First staged in 1937, The Lost Colony, is the nation’s premier and longest-running outdoor symphonic drama. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green, The Lost Colony performs from the end of May through late August every summer at Manteo’s Waterside Theatre, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  For more information, go to www.thelostcolony.org or call (252) 473-6000.