Most people who live in Park Shore think of The Village Shops on Venetian Bay the way they think of Waterside or Fifth Avenue South: a nice place to end up, not a place they came from. That's backwards. The Village went up in the same construction wave that gave Park Shore its first landmarks, and this Saturday, when residents walk over for Wine Around The Water, they're not visiting a shopping center that happens to sit near their neighborhood. They're standing on the ground where it started.
This year's event runs Saturday, September 12, from 5 to 7 p.m., right on the waterfront promenade at Venetian Bay. If you've done it before, you know the shape of the evening. If you haven't, here's what to expect and why it's worth the walk.
What This Saturday Actually Looks Like
Wine Around The Water works on a passport system. You check in, receive a commemorative wine glass and a tasting passport, and then work your way through the Village, stopping at restaurants and retailers for a pour at each one. The passport doesn't stop at wine. Participating restaurants layer in dining discounts for the evening, which means the smart move is to treat this as dinner with stops built in, not a stand-alone tasting that ends when the glass is empty. When you're ready for something sweet, the passport carries through to Naples' only Ben & Jerry's, tucked into the Village.
Check-in has historically been staged on the north side of the property, near Everything But Water, though it's worth confirming the exact spot when you arrive since the Village occasionally shifts logistics year to year. What hasn't changed is the format: sip, stroll, shop, repeat, for two hours along one of the few stretches of Naples where you can do all four without getting in a car.
The Merchants Who've Poured Before
Lineups shift slightly from year to year, but recent editions have included stops at Bayside Seafood Grill & Bar, MiraMare Ristorante, M Waterfront Grille, T-Michaels Steak & Lobster House, Fish Restaurant, and Le Petit French Café on the dining side, with Sukie's Wine Shop, Casanova Venetian Glass & Art, The Village Pub, Patchington, and Whispers of Naples rounding out the retail and pour stations. It's a genuine cross-section of the Village, which is part of why the event has stuck around: you're not tasting the same three wines at three tables. You're moving through the actual businesses that make up daily life for anyone who shops or dines here.
Ground That Was Never Someone Else's
Here's the part most residents don't know, or don't think about while they're holding a glass of Pinot Grigio on the bay.
Park Shore exists because Raymond Lutgert bought roughly 770 acres along the Gulf in the early 1960s and built a planned waterfront community from scratch. Colony Gardens, a 29-unit condominium, was one of the first projects to break ground. Horizon House came the following year and became the development's signature building. By 1976, Lutgert had completed Venetian Villas, a Mediterranean-style building constructed directly over the water. The Village Shops on Venetian Bay opened as part of that same building wave, the retail and dining counterpart to the residential landmarks going up around it.
That matters because it means the Village was never bolted onto Park Shore after the fact, the way a shopping center gets built once a neighborhood already has rooftops and buying power. It was part of the original plan, built alongside the first homes rather than added once they sold.
The Village Shops didn't arrive after Park Shore was finished. It's one of the reasons Park Shore has a shape at all.
So when you walk the promenade this Saturday, you're not stepping outside your neighborhood for an evening. You're retracing the footprint Lutgert laid down before most of the condos around you existed.
A Charity That Grew Up Alongside It
The other piece worth knowing is who the evening actually benefits. Proceeds go entirely to SNIP Collier, a nonprofit built around one mission: affordable spay and neuter services to reduce the number of homeless dogs and cats in Collier County. What started as informal fundraising powered by volunteers, founded by Tom Kepp, became a registered 501(c)(3) in 2015. By 2021, the organization had opened its first low-cost clinic, offering surgeries, exams, microchipping, vaccinations, and preventative care to residents across the county.
That's a meaningful arc for a cause that started as a wine walk fundraiser. You're not handing your ticket money to an abstract cause with a name on a banner. You're funding an organization that now operates a working clinic, and has for several years.
What A Passport Has Cost, And What That Says
The price of getting in has moved with the event's popularity. In 2019, admission ran $20 at the door. By 2024, a pre-sale passport cost $25. Last year, in 2025, that number reached $30 in advance. Each increase tracks reasonably with an event that's grown from a neighborhood fundraiser into one of the Village's most anticipated annual nights, and with a beneficiary that's grown from an all-volunteer effort into a nonprofit running its own clinic. The ticket price climbing isn't a sign the event has gotten less accessible. It's a sign it's outgrown its original scale.
Walking It This Year
If you're planning your evening, pace yourself across the full two hours rather than rushing the tasting stops early. The dining discounts are the better reason to slow down, since they turn what could be a quick wine sampler into an actual dinner out along the water. Comfortable shoes matter more than people expect. The promenade is flat, but two hours of walking between stops adds up.
And when you're standing at the water's edge with a glass in hand, it's worth remembering what you're actually looking at. This isn't a destination Park Shore adopted. It's the neighborhood's own starting point, still doing what it was built to do decades ago: give residents a reason to walk down to the bay and stay a while.
If Park Shore's history is the kind of detail that makes you look at your own street differently, that's exactly the lens the team at Earls & Lappin brings to every conversation about this neighborhood, whether you're already home here or just starting to look. Contact us anytime to talk through what makes this stretch of Naples work the way it does.