Grand Rapids International Wine and Food Festival 2009

My husband and I attended the Grand Rapids International Wine and Food Festival last night. We aren't Wine Connoisseurs by any means, but we know what we like when it comes to wine and we are always willing to try new things, so we thought this would be a fun opportunity and a night out!

What we didn't expect until earlier in the day was that it would cost $15 per person to get in and that got you an engraved Wine glass (a very small glass, great for sampling, but it was heavy duty) and a brochure detailing what was offered at the show. You then also had to purchase "Sampling Tickets" These tickets were suppose to help the vendors cover the costs of the samplings, so you paid $.50 per ticket. Most wine samplings cost 2 tickets and almost all food cost 2-8 tickets. I do not want to forget that it also cost $7 to park at the event.

At the door before we even entered the event, we had already spent $50 for what we expected was a couple of hours of wine drinking and food sampling. What we discovered was different:

As you enter the door you are overwhelmed with hundreds of booths of wine. They supposedly give you a list of all of the wines available and some information about them, but we had a partial list that only contained the wine names and no further information. We then thought we could get more information at the booths themselves...so we started to wander.

Each Booth had the name of the sponsor or winery and some bottles sitting on the table. Each bottle had a label in front of it listing the name of the wine and the type of wine, ie Merlot, Shiraz, Riesling and how many tickets a sampling cost. So far so good right? This is where it goes bad. The people operating the booths were Ferris State University Business School students. This again wouldn't be so bad, I understand why they are there, they are learning what it is like to sell and market a product. It's a great experience....but they do not know a thing about wine or the wine they are trying to sell, in fact one girl told us that she had been in 4 booths already that night, and the festival had only been open for 2 hours! This made asking questions about the wine out of the question! The only information you had was what was on the small index cards in front of the wine.

This is a problem! I only like white sweet wines. I mostly enjoy Riesling, but find the occasional Chardonnay enjoyable. I tried many Rieslings, most of which were too woody for my liking, which I would have known before I wasted my tickets on them had someone been able to answer my questions about the flavors of the wine. I had the same problem with the Chardonnay. Before we knew it, we were about out of tickets and hadn't found a single wine that we enjoyed...not a single one!

At this point we realized we were getting a little drunk and we needed to eat, so we saved the last of our tickets and started wandering around looking at the food booths to find something to eat.

I readily admit that I am a picky eater...but you would think that at a festival where there will be multitudes of people that like different foods, you would offer a good selection. Wrong! Every table we went to was offering some sort of seafood or beef. They all had dessert, which was great, but we wanted food!

Ralph found a beef brisket he was interested in, but discovered that it was so fatty he almost needed a garbage can because of all the gagging that went with it. I do not eat seafood and rarely eat beef (and when I do it is only the hamburger or roast variety smothered in ketchup). So, still starving, we wandered to the "market" section of the festival. Here vendors were offering cheeses, breads, olives, salsas and other appetizers. We were able to scrape up enough bread and cheese to keep us upright. Here we spent another $15 on items to take home with us.

We had had enough by this point and decided after 45 short minutes to move on. We left and realized that we were now starving and a little drunk...great now we have to drive. So we drove to Fazoli's of all places because we spent so much at the festival and enjoyed a $15 Italian wannabe dinner. Fazoli's is always good in a crunch...but it's no Olive Garden even, so that's not saying much.

So after spending $87 we managed to get a good buzz on bad wine and eat at a cheap Italian wannabe restaurant....what a disappointment!

It's a good thing I like mu husband and we generally find a way to have a good time together regardless of the situation :)