My first visit to a wine fair

I visited the Singapore Wine Fiesta on Saturday.

What is the Singapore Wine Fiesta? It’s an open air wine fair organized by the Straits Wine Company.

Entrance fee is S$38 but more expensive if you purchase it at the doors.

Luckily, I won two tickets to the wine fair through a Facebook contest organized by MyDestination Singapore or else I don’t think I would have ever gone to one.

This year’s Wine Fiesta’s held at the Customs House which is just opposite of Marina Bay Sands.

I asked D along to the fiesta since she’s my drinking buddy.

No, we don’t go out drinking but we buy back a bottle of wine sometimes and have a glass or two to celebrate the weekend.

I guess it’s also a wine shopping trip for us.

Entering the Wine Fiesta

The tickets allowed us to visit the Wine Fiesta on one of the three days. I picked Saturday, just in case we have a hangover that we need to sleep off on Sunday.

After showing our tickets, we were given a pink tag. Then we collected a wine glass by handing over a S$10 deposit and was given a yellow tag.

Even though it was a paid event and it was about 3pm, it was really crowded.

The venue itself is tiny and a lot of people would stand in the middle of the already crowded path to chat about the qualities of the wine they had.

Being a non wine connoisseur, my comments usually are: “It’s nice.” “I don’t like it.” “It’s so dry.” “Yummy!” and so on.

There were 65 different brands, according to the booklet. That is a lot of wine!

We mostly tried out Moscato since I do not like dry or tannin wines.

Since it was wine “tasting”, the amount doled out is usually enough for two sips. However, sometimes, one sip of a terrible drink is half a sip too much.

Nice finds

One really fun wine was Chocolate Wine by Rubis. The dark red liquid smelled like chocolate. It was sweet and smooth. But I didn’t like the high alcohol content (15 percent) as it made me dizzy just from the few sips.

Another cool wine was Little Miss Collet Moscato 2012 by Australian winery Woodstock Estace. It was named after the daughter of the winery owner. It smelled like mangoes! Imagine that, a mango-scented wine.

There was a booth with Japanese white wine from Grace Winery. It was too dry for my liking.

I’ve tasted a bit more than 10 different bottles of wine and ended up with a the Rosso Brachetto N.V. (S$27) from Villa M while D bought the Bianco Moscato.

It was the best tasting wine among the rest of the drier wines. Ok, I admit that I was attracted to its price too. There is no way I will spend more on a bottle of liquid.

Take lots of breaks

In the beginning, we went in search of only Moscatos.

After a few 1/8 glasses, we were starting to feel a little woozy so we took a break. We took a lot of breaks afterward too.

Marina Bay Sands was just opposite so everyone who wasn’t drunk had a nice view.

After some tasting, I wasn’t too drunk but I was starting to space out too much. One of my daydream was living in a vineyard (or a house next to a vineyard) and sneaking out to eat the plump grapes. Mmm…

One reason I didn’t as much as a lot of the red-faced visitors there was because I haven’t been trained to down copious amount of alcohol.

I used to break out in hives when I drink wine. So at the start of my Venerdì Vino (which I hope translates as “Wine Friday”), I had hives and rashes.

After a while, I stopped getting bad rashes. Now I’m more used to alcohol so having a little is fine but I get rashes if I drink too much.

Thoughts about the Wine Fiesta

Honestly, I would not pay to join such an event.

Despite the high entrance fee (I could have bought another Rosso Brachetto N.V. and a meal to go with it for S$38 ticket.), the event was really crowded.

It’s not pleasant trying to elbow your way to the table for two sips of wine. It wasn’t fun waiting for the person in front to finish flirting with the wine guy before I could actually hand my glass over for some tasting.

Plus, a lot of people were flushed and looked drunk. You would think that this is a posh event where people float around in clouds of fabric and take delicate sips of wine instead of the huge gulps.

With that entrance fee, I wish the organizer could find a bigger venue. There were too many times, the crowd couldn’t move because everyone was stuck.

Have you visited a wine fair? How was the experience?

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