Between Friday 10th and Sunday 12th July 2009 @ The Amphitheatre, Bristol

As soon as we joined the bustling amphitheatre on the Harbourside for the Bristol Wine & Food Fair, the atmosphere of tastiness went straight to our heads and we went running amongst the free samples, whooping around mouthfuls of lovingly prepared local produce: The colours! The flavours! And everything on cocktail sticks! Nothing is finer than a free sample on a cocktail stick – unless it’s a free wine sample in your complimentary wineglass.

We were awash in a sea of tastes, smells and flavours! My tongue’s highlights (and there were LOADS) included award-winning pork pies from British Fine Foods, Tower Farm’s 18-month-matured Cheddar, delicious wines and olive oil from the uber-friendly Spanish stall-runners at Bodegas Moralia, and mini-pancakes doused in Clarks Pure Maple Syrup! Yum! Then we tried to learn about wines but declined to use the spittoon. It was shaping up to be a rosy day!

We then found ourselves buying things to take home (pies, olives, ice-cream, fudge), buying lunch in the restaurant (delicious tapas provided by The Olive Shed) and contemplating paying a further eight pounds for a wine and cheese lecture/sample session. It was all a bit pricey. Yes, you get free tasters, we will never deny the wonder of a free taster, but a Wine & Food Fair attendee would do well to remember that the £10 entrance fee (£15 for the weekend) really just gets you into a huge and torturously tempting shop. The tasters are just that, tasters, designed to tempt and lure you into a decident land of fine wine and tasty cheese so you won’t be able to help yourself buying things! There are no 3 for £10 bargains to be had here, the quality is far too good for that, so you need to come with a fair few quid in your pocket to make sure you get to take home some of the tasty treats.

Some live music would have gone down nicely too, like at the Bristol Vegan Fayre, but then we found the Yellow Tail wine stall. They’ve colourfully decorated their area with a rainbow of cassette tapes to advertise how they’ve paired up their wine varieties with genres of music! It’s all a bit tongue-in-cheek and gimmicky but it’s great fun to sip on a sumptuous chardonnay or merlot (and not bad at £5), lie back in a Yellow Tail deckchair and have a walkman singing the delights of Kool & The Gang, Tom Jones or Michael Jackson in your ears. I’m not sure it enhanced the taste of the wine like they promised but added a much needed sense of fun and lunacy to the fair!

www.bristolwineandfoodfair.co.uk

Anna Freeman