Taste of B.C.

This wine and food event at The Four Seasons Hotel was to be our last hurrah for the winter before settling into another AAA season. By the way Cuda and Shark are time travelers and we left our Cuban adventure to report on this outing. The Cuba trip will continue later. We checked into the Best Western Hotel at 3 pm to a spotless cozy room, backed up with great service from the front desk, making for a great start to our trip.A free downtown shuttle service was offered to us and we reserved for 4pm. Recovering from a previous night of overindulgence, I was looking forward to diving into the wine tasting
Our room overlooked Granville Street and the Yale Hotel which was temporarily closed pending completion of an adjacent high rise condo It's moss covered roof capped a treasure trove of  musical memories.It felt good to be in the corridor of the downtown Vancouver entertainment scene.
 We arrived early just as they were setting up the ballroom for our event.A very poorly organized event manager barked orders at her underlings as she stressed out at arriving attendees telling us the room wasn't set up yet.Different lines formed for coat checks and ticket pick-ups with the confused event manager trying to get everyone to go to the back of a line-up to get stamped. We ignored her and stood our ground at the front entrance way with our tickets waiting for the doors to open
We entered the ballroom and realized immediately this was a classy gig, and an oyster bar confirmed our first impression, Lots of fine expensive wines and tasty appetizers met our special tasting plates that we always bring with us to these events . The inevitable " Oh where did you get those what a great idea ' compliments followed us as we quickly made a first round. Then the crowd started to fill up the room.There had to be a fly in the ointment , Line-ups started to form at every table especially the appy tables. Why do they have to fuck-up a potentially great event by greedily filling up every square foot of event space lowering the enjoyment of well dressed connoisseurs now reduced to shoving and stumbling into each other as part of the herd.I got rude a few times and cut into lines out of sheer frustration . " Hey you've been at this table all night, hurry up and get to the back of the line" an equally disgruntled attendee, snarled behind me .The oyster bar had a line up like people waiting to get off a sinking cruise ship my oyster slurping was over for the night. After realizing we would have to camp out overnight to get a cracker and a piece of cheese we re-grouped and focused our
 remaining energy onordering flights of the best red wines and there were some good ones.BC red wines were the stars of this event and they just keep getting better.Exhausted and sore after 3 hours of consuming this event we cabbed back to our hotel room and welcome beds after aborting our earlier fantasy of  late night  lounging and nite clubbing.
I love the black out curtains in our room.