4 Wild Things Happening in Northwest Arkansas

Four stories from last August. One of them I overstated badly enough that the winery deserves the correction more than I deserve the credit, and in another I ran two different building projects together and drew a conclusion from the mix. Here is where all four actually landed.

1. Walmart Shareholders Week

This one I described accurately, and then undersold.

The 2025 Associate Celebration was at Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville on June 6, with more than 13,000 associates and shareholders from around the world. Jimmy Fallon hosted and Post Malone performed, both as I said — though Post Malone's was a surprise appearance rather than a billed act. The billed acts were The Killers, Noah Kahan and Camila Cabello, with cameos from Walton Goggins and Chris Paul.

My point about timing was right too. Walmart's new 350-acre home office campus officially opened its first phase on January 17, 2025, so June was the first shareholders week where they could show it off.

One update since: the June 2026 annual shareholders meeting itself was held virtual-only, with no physical venue. The Associate Celebration concert still happened at Bud Walton Arena, with Pink, Benson Boone and Shaboozy. So if you were planning to watch the town flood with Walmart shirts on a predictable annual schedule, the format has shifted.

2. The tea shop has a name now

I said on camera that I did not know the name — "I don't even know if there's a name for it yet necessarily." It has one. It is Fayetteville Tea House, at 315 W. Center Street, around the corner from the Fayetteville Public Library exactly as I described. It opened in December 2025 and is still open, Tuesday through Saturday.

The founders are Avalon Gurel and Alyssa Stockland. I had the origin story right — they did come from the other tea business in town — but I got that business wrong twice. It is Savoy Tea Co., not "Savory Tea," and it was a tea shop and café, not a coffee shop. Savoy's Center Street café closed on May 10, 2025, though it still sells online. So this is less a breakaway and more a succession.

One detail I could not confirm: I said they were converting a house into the shop. I cannot verify that from any source I can reach, so treat it as something I said rather than something established.

3. The Dickson Street student housing — I mixed up two different projects

This is the section I got most tangled, and it is worth being precise because I made a prediction and told you why I was in favor.

The project I described is real. The developer is Subtext, and the counts I gave were right: 151 units and 450 bedrooms, at 624 W. Dickson Street, on the site occupied by Campus Bookstore and Boulders and Brews. Subtext is based in St. Louis. On air I said a St. Louis architect — hedging, "I believe" — and then a Chicago developer. That mixed up two different projects.

Here is what actually happened. A separate seven-story student housing project, from Chicago-based Trinitas Ventures — 185 units and 611 beds on a parking lot near the UARK Theater — was rejected by the Fayetteville Planning Commission in April 2025, and the City Council upheld that rejection on May 20, 2025 by a 4-3 vote with one abstention. Trinitas then sued the city.

So my claim that "I think two of them have been passed" was wrong in the other direction: the one that actually reached the Council was rejected.

My prediction about the Subtext project — "I don't think it's going to be an issue" — has not been tested at all. It had only filed a pre-application, and as far as I can find it has still not reached a Planning Commission or Council vote as of August 2026. I should not claim I was proven wrong on a vote that never happened. What I should say is that I described a smooth path through the city while the one comparable project that did go to a vote got turned down and ended up in court.

If you are watching Dickson Street for supply relief, the honest status is that these proposals are contested, one is in litigation, and none of the towers I was describing is under construction.

My enrollment number was also badly off. I said "almost 22 to 24 to 25,000 students." Fall 2025 enrollment at the University of Arkansas was 34,175, a fifth consecutive record. That is roughly 10,000 more students than I credited, which makes my argument about housing pressure stronger, not weaker.

And the pressure is documented. The city's own 2025 Housing Assessment found Fayetteville ran about 1,179 units short of demand between 2019 and 2023 and needs roughly 1,000 new units a year. About 80 percent of students live off campus. Average two-bedroom rent went from $1,037 to $1,292 in a single year.

4. Sassafras won a real award, and I made it bigger than it was

I said Sassafras Springs Vineyard & Winery in Springdale "won an international award for the best wine of 2025." That is not what happened, and the difference matters.

The 2021 Sassafras Syrah won a Platinum Best-of-Class award at the 2025 Texas International Wine Competition, judged against more than 753 entries from 29 states and 12 countries. That is a category award — best in its class — not an overall best-wine-in-the-world title. It is a genuinely competitive result and I am glad to state it correctly. Separately, their Pinot Noir took a Double Gold Best of Class at the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition, which is a different wine at a different competition, and the two should not be blended together.

I hedged honestly on camera — "I'm not a wine person" — and then said "best wine of 2025" anyway. Those two things do not go together. If I do not know the competition, I should not characterize the prize.

My climate argument needs the same treatment. I called Northwest Arkansas "California-esque," not too hot and not too cold, ideal for grapes. Arkansas has a humid subtropical climate, which is a genuinely different growing environment from California's. Northwest Arkansas sits inside the Ozark Mountain AVA, established in 1986, which spans northwest Arkansas, southern Missouri and northeast Oklahoma — about 70 wineries across roughly 4,500 vineyard acres, the sixth-largest AVA in the country by area. That is a real wine region with real designation. It is not a California analogue, and it does not need to be.

The other businesses I named are worth getting right. Yeyo's El Alma de México in Bentonville — I said "Yaos" — is chef Rafael Rios's restaurant, and he has been a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: South five times, in 2020 and every year from 2022 through 2025. Semifinalist, not winner, and that is still a remarkable run for a restaurant that started as a food truck.

The festival I mentioned is Berry Fest Bentonville, held at The Berry Farm, founded by Dave and Jenny Marrs. It usually runs in June, with u-pick blueberries, music and vendors.

And Onyx, which I listed alongside these as a local business that knows its craft, went on to be named the number one coffee shop in the world in early 2026. That happened after I recorded this. My instinct about the caliber of small businesses here was the part I got right.