Kristine Price Dozier squealed when she saw the email.

Dozier, an international trade consultant, her husband and another couple had already spent around $20,000 on hotels, travel and tickets to attend the 35th annual Food & Wine Classic35th annual Food & Wine Classic, a four-day festival of celebrity chef demonstrations, parties and wine tastings held in June in this Rocky Mountain enclave.

But there was one thing money could not buy, and that was the thing she wanted most.

Two weeks before the festival, the approximately 4,000 people who had purchased basic passes (for $1,550 each) or VIP passes ($4,000) had been informed that they could be among 100 diners admitted to a secluded mountain meadow taping of Top Chef, the Bravo reality show.

A quick response was required. Dozier’s group, all of them from Texas, replied within 35 minutes, but it was not until June 15, the day before the taping, that they received the good news via email: “You are invited to a special dining event.”

“Kristine squealed,” her friend Tiffany Finn, a dentist, said at the taping, green grass on her shoe heels as she sampled an asparagus dish that had been handed to her by a “cheftestant” from Top Chef.

It takes something extra special to goose the appetites of the most discerning food folk these days, whether it is seeing the Top Chef stars Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi and Gail Simmons stride past as they discuss what hazelnuts add to a dish, or an experience even more exclusive.

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A decade ago, just getting a reservation to a hot restaurant like Alinea in Chicago was enough to thrill. But these days, those who can afford it command time with celebrity chefs, private wine tastings in rarely visited cellars and other experiences that are off the menu to most of the public.

“People want access to things they can’t get,” said Garen Staglin, a Napa Valley winemaker who assembled and donated a luxury experience that sold at Auction Napa Valley, a four-day event in June, for $1.5 million.

The three buyers — who included Stacy Jacobs, the ex-wife of Qualcomm Chairman Paul Jacobs — paid $500,000 each for a trip for two couples to Tuscany that included luxurious dinners and visits to wineries such as Antinori nel Chianti Classico, Biondi-Santi and Tenuta di Biserno, all with Staglin’s family as expert guides.

The scene on gala night of Auction Napa Valley, held at the Meadowood resort in St. Helena, California, was described in a trade publication, The Drinks Business: “While bidders got giddy on magnums of Krug and Dom Pérignon, a brass band blasted out ‘Hey Big Spender’ and flapper girls dressed in gold shimmied across the stage after a Balthazar of Screaming Eagle 2014 fetched $440,000.”

Staglin’s trip was not the only one in demand: An excursion to Japan that included dinner at the three-Michelin-star Kanda with the winemaker Naoko Dalla Valle and a 6-litre bottle of her vineyard’s highly rated 2013 red wine went for $720,000. In all, the event raised more than $15 million for charity.

Staglin said that for those who go to Napa every year, a food and travel experience impels them to “irrational generosity” because many already “have more wine in their cellars than they can drink in a lifetime.”

In the early 2000s, one of the hottest tickets one could score on the food festival circuit was for the Burger Bash at the annual South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami Beach.

For around $200, one could meet a cavalcade of spectacularly dressed meat patties and celebrity chef grillers like Bobby Flay, Tim Love and Rachael Ray. After a vote on which was best, the champion’s name was instantly blogged out across dozens of food websites.

These days, fewer reporters attend the Burger Bash and fewer Food Network stalwarts compete. Those with means prefer South Beach events like the $850-a-ticket dinner with the chef Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, and Giada De Laurentiis, a Food Network host.

Guests enjoy dishes like veal on a spin-painted plate, and the festival as a whole gets a sponsor-pleasing dollop of prestige.

“What the 1 per cent like are unique experiences,” said Lee Schrager, the festival’s organizer. “They want access. It’s what everyone wants, but the 1 per cent can afford it. They want intimate.”

The heat is at the higher end, which explains why American Express paid around a dozen social media influencers $1,000 to $10,000 to file dispatches from its Platinum House, a rented mansion on the side of Aspen’s ski mountain, during this year’s Food & Wine Classic.

Stephanie Izard, a Chicago chef who was the first woman to win the Top Chef title, prepared Instagram-ready meals over three days.

In an interview, Erin Maxwell, director for brand partnerships at American Express, said that determining which chefs to bring on board was as simple as noting where high-spending cardholders seek reservations from the company’s concierge service. “We use that data to know where to be,” she said.

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Similarly, American Express noticed a lot of purchases of tickets to this spring’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and set up a Platinum House in the Palm Springs, California, area.

At the inaugural Arroyo Seco Weekend, a music festival held in June at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, the organizers of Coachella showed their understanding that those buying $400 VIP tickets to see acts like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Andrew Bird would be eager to pay for unique dining options.

Available was a $120 picnic basket from République, a Los Angeles bistro, that included two desserts: a rectangle of salted caramel chocolate cake and a square peach crisp.

Forget the bad brown acid of Woodstock. Food is a powerful way to transport festivalgoers mentally — and to keep them coming back, said Nic Adler, culinary director for Coachella and Arroyo Seco.

“I’m just trying to get you to have that bite,” Adler said. “Close your eyes, go somewhere else, open them up and realize, ‘Oh wow.’ ”

Many chefs at the Aspen festival said they had cooked privately for patrons who bought their services at charity auctions. Izard fetched $25,000 to benefit Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a children’s cancer foundation.

Mike Lata, owner of two restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, yielded around $34,000 at a James Beard Foundation event to prepare dinner for 12 at the home of Wenda Harris Millard, the digital advertising executive.

An up-and-comer, Katie Button of Curate in Asheville, North Carolina, raised $8,000 to benefit the area’s Downtown Welcome Table food program. She agreed to cook dinner for eight for banker Dana L. Stonestreet.

The ravenous taste for extravagant food experiences had some people in the food event business scratching their heads in June at news that Time Inc., the owner of Food & Wine Magazine, was moving most of the magazine’s operations to Birmingham, Alabama, from New York.

Despite great restaurants there like Chris Hastings’ Ovenbird and Frank Stitt’s Highlands Bar and Grill, Birmingham is not known for generating the kind of culinary heat that the Aspen set longs to be part of. Along with the news that Susan Ungaro was stepping down after more than a decade as head of the New York-based James Beard Foundation, there was a sense that the food world’s foundations were shifting.

But money and power flow sometimes to new places and new pockets.

At a Wines for Zillionaires tasting in an air-conditioned tent in Aspen’s Paepcke Park, a sommelier, Mark Oldman, opened the session by instructing everyone to pocket the laminated card at each place. It contained tips on how to recognize counterfeit wine at auctions.

Moving on to more pleasant topics, he instructed: “Zillionaires like big bottles.” He ticked the sizes off in increasing grades of rarity: the Salmanazar, 9 litres; the Nebuchadnezzar, 15 litres, equivalent to 20 standard bottles. And then, pointing to his left on the dais, eliciting admiring pants from the hundreds in attendance, he indicated an example of the rarest: an 18-liter bottle, a 2014 pinot noir from Benovia Winery in California. A Melchior, it contained $1,920 worth of wine.

Oldman, one of the wine world’s great showmen, called for a volunteer. A woman who identified herself as Becca obliged, stepping forward and kneeling under the bottle, her pants printed with roses and Eiffel Towers. He spun open a tap in the cork.

Some of the wine, rich with notes of cherry, went into her mouth and some down her chin. The sommelier offered her a napkin just in time to prevent it from reaching her gold necklace.