This weekend, the DCist Food and Drink squad took in the 7th Annual Washington, D.C. International Wine & Food Festival at the Omni Shoreham in Woodley Park. Wine tastings, cooking demonstrations, and food giveaways spanned three ballrooms — a fitting size for a popular event that had, in previous years, occupied the main convention hall at the new Convention Center.
The change in venue didn’t amount to a change in tenor. Perhaps because wine-tasting evokes romantic images of hilly countrysides and candlelit dinners (or because getting hammered on successive wine pours is easier to justify if you’re lookin’ classy), many attendees dressed up for the two-day show. Indeed, one woman wore a painted-on black dress that stopped abruptly at her upper quads. She turned heads on Saturday when she presented herself to chef and lifestyle guru Michael Chiarello, just before he made his own ricotta. If we hadn’t been so nervously awed by Chiarello’s mere presence, we might have demanded that the lady steer clear of our man-crush (who even took a welcome potshot at the much derided Bobby Flay by mentioning the Mesa Grill chef and then noting that “grilling isn’t cooking”). And besides, mellowness is what living NapaStyle is all about.
We the jeans-attired had no such clothing pretentions and were content to take our convention-issued glass and march from table to table in search of the excellent and the bizarre. In the former category, we took a shine to a number of bright New Zealand sauvignon blancs. In the latter category, we tried several Croatian wines that came with a stirring history lesson, determined sales job, and an instruction that we should “look for wines that let us look inside ourselves” — but little else.
Some attendees treated the event as if it were an $92 open bar (which, in reality, it kind of is), paying less attention to what was in their glasses than to whether their glasses were filled. That attitude can exasperate wine reps, retailers, importers, and producers — the pourers who want to show off their wares but can’t afford to bite the hands that feed them. But wine makes people happy, and the hundreds of attendees who graced this weekend’s show were most certainly that.
