The time for Toronto’s yummy Sante Wine Festival is almost upon us! May 3-7, 2006: mark your calendars.
2006 marks the largest number of participating wineries in the Festival’s history — 82 in total. AND! this year, they are giving away a complimentary $5 Starbucks coffee card with your purchase of a Sip, Savour & Shop passport. AND! freakin’ Simone Marie Belgian Chocolate (love) is partnering with Taylor Fladgate port yummy yum yum. AND! the Spa at Windsor Arms is hosting Croft Indulgence Port. AND! Ferrari Maserati of Toronto is hosting tasty Masi. Joy.
The Evite will be created soon. If you’re on my LJ list and are interested in attending, living in or near Toronto, and I don’t have your current e-mail (
Every year it’s a good time, you don’t have to stick close to the group if you don’t want to (although it’s nice to compare notes and have folks to traipse around with), and wine makes strangers friends fast, so don’t be shy if you’re a newbie.
The basic details are as follows:
Event: “Sip, Savour and Shop” wine tasting walkabout in Yorkville
Meeting Location: Manulife Centre Lobby, 55 Bloor St. W, Toronto
When: Saturday, May 6, 11:00am – 3:00pm
Cost: a measly $15.00 for *multiple* glasses of wine and cheese and fruit snacks and chocolate and tasty things cooked by the chefs at Williams-Sonoma
Nothing is better than nearly-free wine! Especially while walking outdoors.
Put on your fancy shoes, new spring clothes, and sunglasses: join together for an annual tradition. Last year we had slight rain, which was a pity, and we started a little late in the day. This year: everybody meets at the Manulife Centre to buy our “Passports” at eleven o’clock SHARP so we can get to the very important business of drinking in the sunshine IMMEDIATELY. Then we walk from store to store, getting our passports stamped and sampling a variety of red, white and sparkling wines. Come join, everyone!
Even though I don’t drink, I’d love to join in! I can certainly sip. 🙂
My LJ email addy actually comes to me, so that’s a good one to use. 🙂
Aha! It’s all about sipping! You see, you get a little baby glass of wine or champagne or port or what have you at every store (there are usually about 20 participating) and you sip it and there is a spitoon if you don’t want to swallow, but you can educate your palate.
I just happen to give myself this one day of the year to be a real lush, and always drink every glass. I think it’s my Scottish ancestry, insisting that I get my money’s worth of inebriation from the passport — ach, aye!
Plus, there’s usually fresh bread and snacks and at the chocolate store there is fondue. It’s basically like heaven.
I would love to come with. I might have to see if I can schedule the night off (may not be possible). But drinking all day and then working all night with fire and knives is on the latter part of the good idea/bad idea spectrum.
gwenorama AT gmail
thanks for thinking of me. I hope I can come.
i’m so there.
I’m not really a wine person, but I hope you all have a great time!
(My LJ email address redirects to my ‘real’ address, so you can use that.)
I will be stuck in a `Negotiations’ class all day – I think this will be my first year missing it! Maybe I could negotiate my class into making a Yorkville run at lunchtime…
C
Might not be able to make it this year due to new condo closing and such stuff… however, if I can, I will!
I am likely interested! Port & chocolate? Yum!
Also, my lovely friend M- is doing a degree in oenology and would possibly be interested, is it okay if I extend the invite to her as well?
(stacyking AT gmail.com)
Is inviting an oenologist along okay? You know it is!
As long as she doesn’t mind that our “tasting notes” usually involve little more than “taaasshty shtuff” or “vinegar in deceptive bottle yuck puke hurl”.
Really, we’re simple folk. But we knows what we likes. Yessir. 🙂
Hope you can make it — it’s good times. I’ll send the Evite out tomorrow afternoon. Forward it as you see fit, and our numbers will grow until we can overrun Yorkville: crushing Vuitton-pursed, Ugg-booted, Gucci-glassed heiresses beneath our $24 Payless plastic heels.
She is following in her dad’s footsteps of making basement wine, which we have dubbed “Slovenian Death Wine”, because the recipe is from Slovenia and the wine will kill if you consume more than a glass or two.
In other words, I think (outside of her thesis context) she’s right there on the “yum/yuck/drunkey!” tasting notes 🙂
ACK!! I don’t think I can (or should) come…that’s a weekend of multiple concerts for me. Besides, I don’t really understand this “sipping” concept you speak of…
wish i could attend, but i’ll be working that saturday. and every other.
-weeps-
Dude! Every year, you invite me to this marvelous event, and every year, I end up unable to come along. This is becoming deeply irksome for me, as I can’t imagine anything nicer than strolling through Yorkville and sampling wine with you on a fine spring day.
This year, my excuse is that I’ll be in Thailand (which, as excuses go, is not bad). But I’ll still miss the opportunity to dally around town with you.
BUT: since we’re both living and/or working in the city, and summer is a-coming, I demand that this finally be the year in which we make good on our now-fourteen-year-old plan to reprise the great Ice Cream On A Grassy Knoll day of ’92. I get home at the end of June—shall we make plans now and thus fend off any possibility of getting too busy later on? I vote July 10, lunchtime. Thoughts?