This past weekend was the Ottawa Food & Wine Show, which is generally considered to be Ottawa’s premiere wine event. It was held at Lansdowne Park, in the civic centre, which was a nicely disguised hockey arena. Basically this event is known, on Friday evenings and Saturday, to be an excellent excuse for the cougars to come out to play. Which is why I decided to go on Sunday.
Driving by Lansdowne Park on Saturday also helped to reinforce that decision: I have never seen such a crazy line up to get into a wine event in my life. This was out of control. A friend from wine school went mid-afternoon on Saturday and waited over half an hour to get into the show.
Sunday was a much more sedate affair. I was able to quickly walk up, buy my tickets and head straight into the show. The hockey arena had been transformed – lots of dramatic black draping and massive booths. It felt more like a fancy trade show than a simple wine and food show. The entry was dominated by a miniature LCBO store – there was a Vintages booth pouring some premium wines for varying quantities of sampling tickets.
Ah yes, sampling tickets. My least favourite part of this. I’m from the Calgary school of wine fairs where you pay $45-$60, depending on the event, and it’s all you can drink. No worries about how many tickets or the constant thought that you need a few more tickets. I finally started asking for half pours and splitting between two wines…
There was a mammoth California booth with many recognizable wineries. A smaller, yet still noticeable Chilean booth. In the next room over there was a massive and well decorated French area complete with a wine bar. Restaurants were serving small plates, there were hotel restaurants doing food and wine pairings… there was my favourite booth, the “free cheese” booth that handed out different varieties of cheese on teeny toothpicks. For free! No tasting tickets required!
My goal for the day was to check out wineries that I didn’t know, specifically those from Niagara and Prince Edward County. I also had a rule where I didn’t want to drink any wines that were easily available in the LCBO or that I had already had. I couldn’t believe the people paying $1 (two tickets) for a 2oz pour of Fuzion, which is a $7.45 wine. Same with the people who were milling around the Yellow Tail table, sampling through as much as possible.
I ended up starting with Mountain Road Wine Company from Beamsville, Ontario – I tasted a delicious 2004 chardonnay and a great riesling. The individual who was doing the pouring was from the National Capital Sommeliers Guild and was very talkative. He was also an Algonquin Sommelier program graduate! I started to notice quite a few of them, wearing their distinctive pins, scattered around the show floor.
I kept wandering. I visited the New York wines booth, tasting some wines from the Finger Lakes region and, despite the fact that the booth employees were not from New York, learned a bit about the different regions just south of the border. I also hit up the Mexican booth because I have never actually tried a Mexican wine – this involved a boisterous Mexican marketer introducing himself to everyone who walked by and attacking people with “Made in Mexico” stickers. It was pretty chaotic, as far as wine booths go.
The Prince Edward County booths were also great… it’s just that my favourites were visiting and I had already tasted most of their wines. I had stopped by Rosehall Run while visiting the County this summer and had tasted Black Prince and the Grange while at the Taste! event in Picton during September. The only PEC wines there that I had not tried were Harwood – and I found them very good indeed. Black Prince is sort of a co-operative where small wineries can bottle, blend and label their own wines.
I also loved the Prince Edward County cheese booth. $2 (4 tickets) for a cheese platter. It was worth it.
The Wine & Food Show was definitely worth checking out, however I found it to be very expensive. It was $17 to get in the doors with tasting tickets an additional $0.50. My most expensive wine was a 2005 Catena Malbec that retails for $60.95 – this had a price tag of 8 tickets, or $4. I also found the people working the festival were surprised when I asked for a half pour – I generally explained that I was an Algonquin Sommelier student (one guy scoffed that it seemed like every third person was) and that I was at the fair to taste and not to drink… the half pour definitely helped my sample tickets to go a lot further.
I was also surprised at the number of unknowledgeable people behind the booths – a few just looked at me blindly, when I asked a question, or would just hand me a brochure. I had been hoping for a bit more education and was envisioning a wine fair where serious wine drinkers and winery representatives could come together to worship at the altar of the holy grape.
My expectations may have been to high. Or perhaps it was the influence of the LCBO, the liquor monopoly that regulates the vast majority of alcohol sales within the country. When I attended events in Calgary, for example, the individual who ran a supper club could negotiate with wine stores and agents to bring in bottles of wine not easily available elsewhere. This seems to be infinitely more difficult in Ontario. But this is another rant for another time. I’m not sure what it was, but I did find myself disappointed with the Food & Wine Show. I will likely attend next year, however I will probably go in with more realistic explanations and a better plan of attack.
