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| - I would not be surprised to find that this year's 2016 Gourmet Food and Wine Expo ends up being the last. I attended Nov.17th's VIP Night and was sorely disappointed in, oh, just about everything. I've been going for over 10 years, and I have seen it get progressively sadder. Why the organizers still call it the Food AND Wine show puzzles me.....there are by far more individual beer, cider and spirit producers presenting new, quality products than there are wineries. The high end tasting room is no longer there. There is no LCBO mini Vintage shop to buy anything you've tried, liked and thought, 'Hey, this would be a nice night cap after the show!' It boggles the mind that no one tied in the annual release of the Beaujolais Nouveau with the VIP night. I would have loved to try all the new BN's before going out to buy this years supply for the holidays! My husband and I go to try product so that we get a sense of emerging trends in wines and to try wines that perhaps we wouldn't normally buy or have access. It also seemed that there were less actual booth offering wine selections. Certainly less Canadian or local wineries.
The food was over priced for sample sized portions 3-7 tickets per sample (each sample ticket = $1), and frankly, there wasn't a lot of 'gourmet' food....more like after clubbing snack foods (which is fine, but it isn't emerging gourmet cuisine). The food was, okay...not stellar but average.
In the past, there were a great number of artisan food/culinary products and I would do some of my shopping for holiday gifts there. This year, I was hard-pressed to find anything of interest. There were also very few free samples of product.
All-in-all, it seemed smaller, listless and at least to me, uninteresting. It has become less of an expo and more of a 'not so cheap' drunkfest for the under 25 crowd (I wonder how they afford it....with tickets at $45 and the average cost of sampling $40+ per person). I watched a wine tasting event with highly respected wine expert, Christopher Waters, give a talk and the crowd was mostly made up of people sucking back their mixed drinks while he gave some insightful wine knowledge (and not a few of them threw back the tasting samples all at once before he even started the talk!). I probably won't go back, if indeed, they do another next year. I could take what I spent yesterday on that event, and go buy some great wine and cook a REAL gourmet food feast for my friends. Sad to see it decline as it has.....
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