There are still tickets left for the D.C. International Wine and Food Festival on June 24th and 25th at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington, DC. at the event, there will be over 1200 wines to taste and from 280 wineries -- that's a lot of wine to try in two days. Here's a list of the wines and wineries that will be there. I don't see how anyone could possibly get around to all the wineries for tastings, but anything is possible if you have enough determination. They should give away prizes to those that try all the wineries.

On top of the wine, there will be plenty of food demonstration as well. Many local "celebrity" chefs will be performing demonstrations on the two stages at the exhibit area. These chefs include:

• Roberto Donna – Galileo
• Morou Ouattara – Fokitchens
• Vikram Garg – IndeBleu
• Katsuya Fukushima – Café Atlantico
• Bryan Voltaggio – Charlie Palmer Steak
• Noriaki Yasutake – Perrys Restaurant
• Michael Chiarello – Food Network’s Easy Entertaining/Chiarello Family Vineyards/NapaStyle

I'm actually quite interested in seeing Michael Chiarello in person since he's one of my more favorite Food Network chefs. It's not necesarily his recipes that I like, but the techniques you learn on how to prep food in advance and make cooking the day of the meal much easier. All I have to say is that Sunday at the Storch residence is prep day.

Guided tastings and seminar will also be available for an extra cost (from $25 to $40), led by notable wine experts such as:

• Gloria Maroti Frazee, Director of Education at Wine Spectator
• Mark Oldman, author of the best-selling Oldman's Guide to Outsmarting Wine (Penguin) and wine columnist for Every Day with Rachael Ray
• Michael Westrick of Sterling Vineyards
• Ben Giliberti of The Washington Post
• Michael Franz, Editor of WineReviewOnline.com

A complete list of classes and seminars is available here. I'm particularly interested in Gloria's seminar on wine pairings, since that's something that I'm especially bad at. Choosing a good wine to go with your meal can be a challenging skill to master.

Before this year, I was never able to go, because this event is close to my birthday and I'm always away, but this year I'm planning to go. it also helps that this year, someone sent me some free tickets to go. But, just because I like all of my loyal readers so much (especially those that read the whole post), and also because I have a couple extra tickets, I'm going to give a two of them away to you. All you have to do is leave a comment with your favorite restaurant in the DC Metro area on this post by Wed at 9 AM. (Of course, make sure you use your real email address so I can get in touch with you if you win.) And if you want to put a little detail in as to why you like the restaurant, that will be nice too, but it won't have any bearing on who wins the tickets. I'll do a random drawing through the extremely scientific method of drawing names out of a hat, and announce the winner later in the evening on Wednesday.

For those of you who don't win, you should buy your tickets here. Prior to June 16 (Friday) single day tickets are $61 and two day tickets are $82. After that, the prices go up to $71 and $92 respectively.