People's Choice Vote: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the People's Choice Vote is and who runs it

The People's Choice Vote is the vendor award ballot run by the Adirondack Wine and Food Festival, a festival organizer based in New York. It is not a media readers' poll: the ballot belongs to a single festival and asks the people who attend it to pick their favorite vendors, which makes the pool of voters and the pool of nominees the same crowd.

The survey runs on the festival's own website, and the voting page sits at adkwinefest.com/vote/. No outside contest service carries this ballot, so the form, the rules and the posted results all stay under the adkwinefest.com domain. The program belongs to the best-of vertical on the business side, and supporters take part by choosing favorite vendors in each category.

The 2026 results, printed on the voting page itself, show the shape of the ballot. In the wineries group, presented by Burch Bottle & Packaging, Adirondack Winery took the win ahead of Three Brothers Winery and Thousand Islands Winery. In distilleries, presented by the NYS Distillers Guild, Cooper's Daughter Spirits finished first, with High Peaks Distilling and Cooperstown Distillery behind. Among cideries, Awestruck Ciders led Bombshell Hard Cider and Extreme Heights Cidery, and in breweries Adirondack Brewery came out on top.

The dated record for this New York festival ballot

Two editions of the People's Choice Vote are confirmed: 2024 and 2026. Both are anchored to the Adirondack Wine and Food Festival's spring season, and in both cycles the voting phase fell in May. The 2024 ballot page carried festival posts dated May 13, May 15 and July 5 of that year, including a Best of the Fest item, which ties the vote to festival weekend rather than to a standalone online campaign.

The 2026 edition is the most recent confirmed run, and its full results are posted on the same voting page that carries the ballot. Beyond those two years, the organizer has not published a first-run date or a standing schedule, and no 2027 edition has been announced.

Several facts a supporter might want are simply not printed. The festival has not published a complete category roster for the current ballot, a per-supporter voting limit, or the precise opening day and closing day of the live cycle; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No nomination round is described on the voting page either, and no promotion schedule for this market is published anywhere by the organizer.

What the organizer does state is the reward side: its own description says each year attendees complete the People's Choice Vote Survey to win a grand prize, voting for their favorite vendors in each category. That sentence, published on the festival's vendor page, is the clearest statement of how the ballot and the prize connect.

How a supporter votes in the Adirondack Wine and Food Festival survey

The mechanic is a survey, not a click-and-go poll. The organizer's own wording, published on its vendor page, reads: "Each year, attendees complete our People's Choice Vote Survey to WIN an AMAZING Grand Prize, voting for their favorite vendors in each Category." A supporter therefore moves through the ballot category by category, selecting a favorite vendor in each one, and then submits the completed survey.

To take part today, a supporter opens the festival's voting page, reviews the vendor groups listed for the current cycle, picks favorites in each group, and submits. The published 2026 results confirm the groups in play last cycle included wineries, distilleries, cideries and breweries, each with a winner, a runner-up and a second runner-up named.

Two practical points follow from the organizer's own materials. First, the survey is framed as an attendee activity tied to a grand prize drawing, so the entry fields the page asks for matter as much as the vote itself; a supporter who skips them may lose the prize side of the transaction. Second, the festival does not publish an account requirement, any limit on repeat visits, or an eligibility statement for the survey on its voting page, so the form as it appears during the live window is the only authoritative version of the rules.

Since the survey lives under the adkwinefest.com domain instead of a contest platform, no separate dashboard exists for round dates. The voting page is the single source for the live form, the categories and the posted results.

How this ballot differs from New York's other public votes

New York's public-vote landscape on this site is dominated by media-run readers' choice contests, and the People's Choice Vote stands apart from all of them. The six siblings are city and regional best-of programs: Best of Brooklyn, Best of Hudson Valley, The City's Best, Best of New York City, Best of Queens, Best of the Bronx and Best of Westchester. Each of those is anchored to a publication or a borough and opens voting to a general readership across hundreds of business categories.

This ballot answers to a festival instead. Its nominees are the vendors who exhibit at the Adirondack Wine and Food Festival, its voters are the attendees of that festival, and its window rides on festival weekend in May rather than on a publication's editorial calendar. The result set is narrower and more concrete: a winery, a distillery, a cidery or a brewery that wins here has won the room that actually visited its table.

For a vendor, that difference matters when planning support. A push aimed at this ballot reaches festival attendees, not a borough-wide audience, so the effort concentrates on the people most likely to have tasted the product. For a supporter comparing New York ballots, the practical test is simple: if the business you want to back poured at this festival, this is its ballot, and the borough programs listed above will not carry it.

Strengthening support in this festival survey

Support in the People's Choice Vote comes from attendees who complete the survey and select a vendor in each category, so the organizer's own framing points to where the votes are: inside the festival, during the May window. A vendor's most reliable move is to make sure every visitor to its table knows the survey exists and which box carries its name, since the ballot groups vendors by type rather than by a printed roster the festival publishes in advance.

The festival has issued no statement on outside voting help, purchased votes, or software-assisted balloting for this survey, and no rule text on those subjects appears on its voting page. That silence cuts both ways: nothing forbids a broader push, and nothing protects one, so a vendor planning a campaign beyond the festival grounds should read the live ballot's terms first.

General tactics that work across public votes, from reminder timing to supporter outreach, are collected in this guide to getting more votes online. Applied here, they translate into a simple plan: reach attendees before and during festival weekend, name the exact category your business sits in, and give supporters the voting address directly so nobody lands on the wrong page.