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Another week, another festival back from the brink after a couple of years away due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This past week it was the Winnipeg Wine Festival, which held ancillary events all week leading up to the public tastings at the RBC Convention Centre on Sept. 23 and 24. And while I couldn’t make it to as many of the events held during the week as I would have liked, I did manage to pop in to the big show over the weekend.
The Winnipeg Wine Festival’s public tastings returned to the RBC Convention Centre for the first time since 2019 on Sept. 23 and 24. (Ben Sigurdson / Winnipeg Free Press)
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This year’s public tastings were held in the newish City Room/Hall C for the first time, a lovely space which provided some nice natural light and plenty of elbow room. And while it’s not the first big wine show I’ve been to this year, it was still initially a bit unnerving being unmasked around so many people, especially when the wine is flowing freely.
All that being said, it didn’t take long for there to be a feeling of normalcy at the fest; it was a nice break from our COVID-haunted reality. But I digress.
The addition of two sections — the “Not Ready for Fall” area featuring summer-ish drinks and the “Cloud Wine” area featuring bubbly, flavoured wines and more — seemed to be popular, and there was a pretty consistently long line for the Aperol spritz booth, which was set up next to a miniature bocce pitch.
In the rest of the room, there were enough new products being poured that people certainly seemed engaged and curious. I like revisiting old faves every once in a while, but at the public tastings I’m always most interested to try the new stuff. (The additional elbow room also meant I could nerd out and make tasting notes that I might actually be able to decipher one day.)
Overall, organizers said attendance was shy of 2019 numbers by perhaps a few hundred people, which is good news for the folks at Special Olympics Manitoba. The wine fest is their primary fundraising event of the year — they’ve probably missed the public tastings more than anyone.
Ben Sigurdson (left) and Nonsuch head brewer Mark Borowski clean out leftover malt from the tank while brewing After Deadline. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press)
Hey, I helped make a beer! The Free Press and Nonsuch Brewing Co. have teamed up to create After Deadline, an Italian Grape Ale, in celebration of the Free Press’s 150th anniversary. It’s a farmhouse ale infused with Pinot Grigio, and we’re launching the beer on Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m. at Nonsuch (125 Pacific Ave.). There will be beer-and-food pairings, and I’ll chat with folks from Nonsuch about the beer and how it came to be. More info and tickets are available here.
Eva and I are hoping to get some feedback from you, Dish readers, on what you’d like to see in this newsletter. Would you like to see more (or less) of anything? Anything we’ve missed altogether? Let us know.
Cheers,
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