Food & Wine Show

Josh and I volunteered to pour wine at the Twin Cities Food & Wine Experience Sunday, March 1, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. I heard about the opportunity through a Twin Cities “Uncorked” wine club email and we jumped on the opportunity. Tickets to the show are normally $70/person, but if we poured wine for three hours then we got to hang out the rest of the time for free. Sounded good to us!

We had to be at the show at 10:30, so we decided to hit up Blackbird for breakfast beforehand. Good food, decent prices, kind of a random space. If I lived in South Minneapolis I would probably go out of my way to eat there a little more often. As it is, the Original Pancake House in E.P. is okay by me!

We had to be there at 10:30 and work until 2, but from 10:30 to 11 was set-up and we mostly stood around, and from 1:30-2 was a mandatory pour break so we basically just stood around and drank wine and chatted with people until our replacements came at 2. From 11-1:30, though, we were BUSY! We had eight different wines to pour and people were lined up! And since we manned the booth by ourselves, we had to answer a lot of questions – some of which we knew the answer to, some of which we didn’t. Fortunately we both know enough about wine to wing it, but I have to admit I probably just made things up a time or two.

Our booth was sponsored by Trinchero Winery of Napa Valley, but was not actually Trinchero wines – instead, ours were wines distributed by the same guy who distributes the Trinchero stuff (there was a Trinchero wine booth in the main area and also in the reserve room). Our wines were from 4 different northern California wineries, including Napa, Mendocino and Amador, a county about an hour east of Sacramento. All of our wines were sustainably farmed, packaged, transported, etc., although only one of them was certified organic.

Our eight bottles included two standard corks, four twist-off caps and two Tetra-pak juice box-style packaging. We had four whites and four reds: a lightly oaked chardonnay, an unoaked chard that came in the juice box, a muscato (yum!) and a pinot gris. My favorite was, of course, the muscato. It was not as sweet or as syrupy as many moscatos are, but if anyone asked for a sweet wine we gave it to them and almost all agreed with our description of “liquid candy.” Hardly anyone went for the unoaked chard, and I believe that’s because if you like chards then you expect them to be oaked. The unoaked chard tasted very un-chard-like (a plus in my non-chard liking book) and was in one of the juice box-style packaging.

For reds we had a barbera, a merlot, a cab blend and a 100 percent cab. We ran out of the barbera pretty quickly, 1) because it tasted so good and 2) because it is a grape many people were not familiar with and they wanted to try it out. (Same with the muscato.) The straight cab was in the juice box. I think Josh liked the cab blend the best, and I liked the barbera.

People didn’t seem to be as anti the Bandit in the juice box as I thought they would be. Josh was good about recommending them for parks, boats, rivers and other places you can’t have glass, plus there is the environmental aspect – they can load what would be 26 trucks worth of glass bottles onto one truck’s worth of the juice boxes. Plus you get a full liter instead of 3/4s in a bottle, so it’s economical, too. And, not bad wine.

Brad, the distributor, lives in Waconia and sent us home with 8 bottles of wine of our choice for helping him out. Rock on! He was a darn nice guy and Josh even emailed him later that night and said if he ever needed help again, we are more than happy to volunteer! Although it was busy and tiring, it was also a lot of fun chatting people up and being on the inside of a pretty cool industry (even if it was only for a few hours).

After we were done working we walked around the show ourselves. Fortunately, we were able to leave our coats/wine at the Trinchero booth. In addition to lots of wine tasting booths, there were also cheese and other food booths, a decent-sized beer section and other random stuff to look at, eat, taste or buy. All in all, I don’t know that $70/ticket is unreasonable. You leave fat, happy and as tipsy as you choose to be.