Primrose Chef and Director of Operations Collin Kelley is excited his downtown restaurant will host the Pinot Posse’s Steamboat Springs tour next week, which pairs the fine food he creates with fine wine his customers love.

“It’s a wine dinner where we’re bringing in a whole bunch of winemakers who are there to showcase their wines, and then we’re pairing a menu with those wines,” Kelley said of the event, which takes place Tuesday, Jan. 18, at the Primrose at 1110 Yampa St., Suite 100.

This year’s Pinot Posse Tour will include stops Jan. 17 at Table 6 in Denver, Jan. 18 at the Primrose in Steamboat Springs and Jan. 19 at the Free Range Kitchen in Basalt.

“This event will be some big names, big vineyards that people know and carry some really cool cult following wines that are highly collectible,” Kelley said. “These are wines that people seek out and are hard to find and hard to obtain.”

Kelley said the night will be centered around the winemakers from California and Oregon, including Sea Smoke Cellars and Victor Gallegos, Owen Roe and David O’Reilly, Alden Alli and Dan Kosta, JK Carriere and Jim Prosser, August West and Ed Kurtzman, and Senses and Chris Strieter.

This is something that they’ve done in Steamboat for years, … and it’s put together by the distributor of these wines in Colorado,” Kelley said. “He brings all these guys out once a year just to showcase their wines and have a have a little traveling roadshow that turns into a pretty fun party.”

The night will begin with a cocktail reception from 6-7 p.m.

“One of the winemakers makes a really special champagne-style sparkling wine out of his Pinot Noir,” Kelley said. “So we’ll be doing oysters and shrimp and bubbles.”

The cocktails and appetizers will be followed.

Kelley said that seven different wines will be served that night. The cost of the evening is $195 per person, and reservations can be made on OpenTable.

“The winemakers will talk about their wines as they’re being poured,” Kelley said. “Then we’ll serve the course that’s paired with those wines.”

This is the first time that Primrose, which will celebrate its one-year anniversary in February, has been included in the Colorado Tour. Kelley said it’s a great chance to sample some elite wines, which will be available for purchase at the event.

“We did some of these back during Steamboat Food & Wine Festival and had such a nice time, and it was really well received and popular,” Kelley said. “We looked at how we could do some more of these types of events, and the distributor approached us and said, ‘Hey, we should we should do a special dinner with the Pinot Posse that he brings from California.’ He wanted to make a splash in Steamboat.”

John Salmanski, of CS Wines, the company that brings the wine producers in for the Pinot Posse, said that the tour alternated between different Colorado Towns.

“Over the years, we try to get to mountain towns like Vail, Aspen and at times we have done Colorado Springs and about every third year we try to get back to Steamboat,” Salmanski said.

Salmanski said the events provide a chance for wine lovers to meet with some of the biggest names in winemaking.

“It’s amazing because nowhere else do you see such winemakers hanging together at a dinner,” Salmanski said of the wine makers from Willamette Valley, Santa Rita Hills, Russian River Valley and the Sonoma Coast. “You are never gonna see six winemakers together in one room, drinking all their wines — and because we have done this now for 17 years, you could be sitting with one of the California guys, lets say Kurtzman, and he’ll tell you exactly what David O’Reilly in Oregon is doing. It’s a whole camaraderie thing and nobody it asking who is pouring first. It’s, ‘Hey we are here, let’s go, let’s drink some pinot.’”

John F. Russell is the business reporter at the Steamboat Pilot & Today. To reach him, call 970-871-4209, email jrussell@SteamboatPilot.com or follow him on Twitter @Framp1966.