By Jordan Carrier from Everything Wine, River District
After a long drought, tasting season is once again
upon us: Top Drop is doing its second night tonight and the Vancouver
International Wine Festival is next week. Since many of us are understandably
rusty at these events, I thought I’d repost a helpful list of Dos and Don’ts I
wrote a couple years ago. I’ll be back soon with amazing new wines to show you,
but until then:
DOS AND DON’TS OF WINE FESTIVALS
DO Explore. You’re
here to explore and discover new wines, so don’t make a beeline to the stuff
you already know. Even if you don’t care for a lot of the esoteric choices, 1)
you didn’t have to buy the bottle and 2) now you know.
DON’T Wear Fragrances.
We can all smell amazing, but everyone came to sniff good wine, not
perfume/cologne/aftershave. Nothing roils a wine geek more than finding that
the Petit Sirah they’ve waited for weeks to try shows notes of Axe Body Spray.
DO Spit. The spittoons
are there to help. There are hundreds of wines being poured and you aren't
magic. Remember that they can’t legally serve you if you’ve rendered
yourself liquid, so staggering up to a booth saying “gimme moas shpensive one”
won’t produce the desired result, and getting kicked out of Wine Fest isn’t
classier than getting ejected from The Roxy. Or so I'm told.
DON’T Sport Spit. We’ve
all seen those dudes who can hit the spittoon from 20 paces away, like a llama.
Please don’t try to do that. If you fail, it’s a disaster. If you succeed, it’s
still bizarre. Get a new superpower.
DON’T be a Booth Hog.
There are probably lots of folks behind you, so when you finally get up to your
desired booth, it’s not the best time to start telling the winemaker about the
time you went to this winery and it was great but there was this dog there and
you like dogs but you saw almost the exact same dog earlier in the city with a
white patch on the left eye instead of the right eye but come to think of it
that could be because of the mirror. Get your glass filled and then step to the
side to let others get theirs, and watch your karma grow and blossom into a
karma flower.
DO Have a safe ride home. No jokes here, get home safe, it is literally the most important thing
you’ll do during Wine Fest. Both Skytrain lines end a 5 minute walk from the
Convention Centre, where Wine Fest is. Find someone on the train who also has
purple teeth and compare notes.
That’s it! Have a great time, and Happy Drinking!
Contact Jordan directly by email (JCarrier@everythingwine.ca) or find him in the Vintage Room of Everything Wine's Vancouver location River District at 8570 River District Crossing.
