The Dos and Don'ts of Wine Festivals

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. Try parkour. Anything.

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.