Good Food and Wine Show....did I mention the wine?

Friday was a really fun day! Carly found out about the Good Food and Wine show at the Melbourne Exhibition Center a week or so ago and it is going on this weekend. On Friday we were kind of putzing around in the morning trying to figure out what to do and so Carly reminded me of the show and we went online to find out what was going on. There were multiple chefs performing shows throughout the weekend including Gordon Ramsay from Hell's Kitchen back home. We have mentioned before that we watch Master Chef Australia pretty much every night on our one good channel. Well, we saw that two of the judges, George and Gary, were going to be at the show and decided we had to go see them. We both got ready and headed over to the exhibition center.

Once we arrived we had to get tickets and figure out if we could still get in to see George and Gary. This was a bit of an ordeal as the right hand didn't know what the left was doing in terms of ticketing. The first booth we went to was for general admission tickets. We asked them if we could still get into the show we wanted to see and they looked at us like we were idiots. They sent us down to the Ticketek booth (Australian Ticket Master) and said we had to get our tickets down there. Well once we got to the Ticketek booth they said we had to go back to the general admission booth, but at least they knew that we could then get the show tickets inside for no additional charge.

Whew! Once we were in we headed straight over to the performance box office and got our tickets for the show. It was now about 1:30 and our show was at 4:30 so we had ample time to wander around the exhibition floor. There were over 300 booths set up on the floor with products ranging from food to appliances to exercise equipment. Our first stop was a guy demoing a shammy like the Shamwow! back home, he was pretty good and we almost ended up getting one when we saw its amazing capabilities in person. After that we wandered about for a while, at first we were kind of hesitant about going up to the booths and getting samples because we knew that we wouldn't be buying them, but that didn't last long! After a couple of booths we were pouncing on anyone walking around with a tray of toothpicks and bite size morsels of goodness. We had chocolates, tortellinis, meats, dips, chips, nougat, cheeses, pizzas, coffees, granola bars, and pretty much anything we could get our hands on.

After a little while Carly saw a book stand that had times that some of the chefs would be signing their books. I think Gordon Ramsay had about every other time slot since he has about a dozen different books out. Anyway, Car saw that George was going to be signing his book so she wanted to see if it looked any good. Well once she found out it was a Modern Greek recipe book she was sold!
After that she started getting really nervous about meeting a celebrity so we decided to head over to the wine portion of the floor and get a little liquid courage. We headed in and surveyed the situation. Most people were wandering around with glasses stopping at the various winery booths and tasting whatever they wanted. We quickly asked someone where they got the glasses and started our tour of Australian wines.

We started off at the first booth we found and tasted a few of their varieties. The people were very friendly at all the stops we made, giving us some info about their winery and where it was located. They would tell us things about the wines and most of it went over my head. I know relatively little about wine, I usually let Carly or someone else pick a good one but I thoroughly enjoy drinking them so I just smiled and nodded knowingly as they talked about the different aspects of the wine we were tasting at the time and generally tried not to look like an idiot when I swirled and sniffed the wine before drinking. We watched the movie Sideways a couple months ago which I am grateful for because it not only was a good flick but it taught me a few things about wine tasting that I used at this event, I highly recommend it.

After a few stops we were both more relaxed and it was almost time for the show so we headed over to the theater. George and Gary put on a good show, it was "British vs. Greek" cuisine with each one cooking a couple things from their respective backgrounds while cracking jokes and having a good time with each other. They were much more laid back than they are on the show as they didn't have to have their serious judging faces on. George cooked Avgolemono Soup and Souvlaki and Gary did Trout and Doughnuts. Everything looked really good of course. They handed what they made out to people in the audience but they never made it over to our area.

After the show Carly made a bee line for the book signing line as we figured it would be pretty long. It wasn't long in the end and she got up to him pretty quickly. She had planned out what she was going to say well ahead of time, a comment about something that happened on the show. I stayed on the outside so I could take a picture of them together being the good boyfriend that I am. They chatted for a minute while he signed her book and I took a couple pictures. Carly then came out to me and we looked at what he wrote "Dear Karly....". The rest didn't matter as we were both disappointed that he had misspelled Carly's name. After a few minutes of discussion about whether or not to go back and fix it or just take it as it was we decided it would be best to get it fixed. So Car went back in line and George was very apologetic and happy to correct his mistake. Carly also had him sign a canvas shopping bag we had picked up along the way and this time he got her name right the first time.

Once that ordeal was over with we had both worked up an appetite again so we went back to explore the areas we hadn't been to yet. We made our way through to the back of the show, sampling as we went of course, and once we were back there we saw that there was a wine tasting course going on inside the wine area. We walked over and asked the girl watching the entrance to the wine side about it. After she talked for about 10 seconds I asked "where are you from?" at the same time Carly said "are you from America?". This was the first person outside of our neighbor that we had talked to that had an American accent and we were both excited to talk to her. It turned out that she and her fiancee who was sitting next to her were from Minnesota and we chatted for a while about being here and jobs and things to do and everything else you talk about when you meet someone from your own country while in a foreign one.

After exchanging info and finding out when the next wine tasting was, we resumed our main mission of sampling wine from everywhere in Australia in one go. I was pleasantly surprised after a couple of stops that Carly found first one then several breweries sampling some of their beers and we headed over to them as I am much more interested in micro breweries than wineries myself. The brewers were all very friendly and I was discussing with them some of the beers I know and love from back home and they were explaining how the government taxes breweries out their ears which explains why beer is so expensive and why there are much fewer micro breweries than back home.

It was 7:45 now and time for the wine tasting, we headed back over there and walked in. Each seat was set up with small amounts of 6 different kinds of red wine and there were definitely fewer people attending than seats available. We sat down in the second row and were quickly bored by the presenter who was an older man clearly knowledgeable about wine but not a good presenter. We sat through his spiel and drank our wine trying to taste and smell the different things he was describing about each one. If you've never been to a wine tasting before you may not know that usually people will have a sip or two of each and maybe even spit out the wine rather than drink it all, not us. We were past the point of caring by now so we both polished off our glasses rather than sip and move on. Carly left one or two on the table but I was done with all of mine by the end. All in all it was no more than a glass and a half but we were chuckling about it to ourselves and felt pretty good about it in the end when we saw what came next.

After the tasting was over we were shocked and saddened to see some workers come in with big trash cans and trays for the glasses and start dumping out all of the leftover wine. There were probably 70-80 seats with 6 glasses each, and in our tasting the seats were less than half full. Over the course of the weekend I'm sure they'll dump out quite a few cases of pretty good wine!

The show was nearly over for the day so we just headed over to another brewery booth we had spotted in the corner during the wine tasting and as we were feeling pretty good by now we started chatting up the people running the booth and signed up for subscription to beer and brewer magazine and got a free t-shirt. We sampled their beers and had a good time.

By the end of the show we were both full and satisfied. It was well worth the price of admission which was only AU$27.50 each. We ate and drank a few times that amount over the course of the day I'm sure! We also bought a few things which were all discounted at the show so now we have some good stuff to eat at home. We even got some freebies including a few new shopping bags and an Italian beer from one of the brewers that Carly had told we have a recipe for a beer bread that calls for an Italian lager, Hooray for Foodies!