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Table Scraps

The Cornucopia dilemma
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By Nicole Fitzgerald

How do you navigate your way through Cornucopia – Part I.

Thursday, Nov. 9 warm up alcohol tolerance at Meet the Vintners wine tasting which puts the spotlight on wines with no music or food to distract. $55. Then to the House Party to catch up on local gossip. $35. A quick bus ride to ARTrageous, a truly local party with live music and artists finishes my night. $35.

Friday, Nov. 10 I might be up in time for the Latte Art Seminar, but most likely I’ll be stepping out at noon to the Women, Wine and Books Literary Luncheon. $99. Squeeze in the Afternoon of Decadence seminar highlighting boutique after-dinner drinks and CinCin desserts before running home to get ready for the Friday night festivities. ($75).

Runners to heels, it’s off to the Quattro winemaker dinner featuring wines and food from four Italian regions. $225. Mask on, pearls off before heading to the Bearfoot Bistro After Party. $250.

Saturday, Nov. 11 is devoted to study: Australian wines, chef’s table luncheons, oysters and champagne, and festival gem the 5th Annual Rare Wines. $50-$150. Two hours to sober up then off to Crush, $100, Araxi After Party, $120, and Divine Soul After Party, $115.

Every year, I promise myself I’ll check out one of the festival Sunday brunches at either the Fairmont or Four Seasons. $55. But, every year it’s a Sunday of rest.

So my ideal Cornucopia totals roughly $1,400. Not bad, when you could probably spend the same amount of money on a Las Vegas weekend with little to no satisfaction and more red Jell-O and iceberg lettuce than you’d ever want to consume in a lifetime.

So when a friend (a visiting Australian only here for a year) asked me what events she should attend at the Cornucopia experience I was stumped. I loved all the parties a media pass granted admission to. How could I narrow my passions to a proposed $300 budget?

So this is what the two of us worked out.

First I asked if she had been to a winemaker dinner before. She hadn’t. So I gushed for a good five minutes about these magical enchanted evenings of a never-ending parade of perfectly choreographed food and wine pairings. Chefs create menus specifically to highlight wines. Both a chef and a winery representative host the evening, with chats between courses. The winemaker dinner embodies the spirit of the festival with food, wine, education and friends.

While Araxi’s 25th anniversary dinner Big Guns wields all of my food favourites — truffles across the board, lamb, Kobe beef, lobster and enough chocolate to even satisfy me — the $350 price tag didn’t quite make the budget. So we narrowed it down to the Hy’s Steakhouse with Rodney Strong Vineyards dinner, $150, and Elements Urban Tapas Parlour with Summer Hill Pyramid Winery, $140, leaving some funds open for other experiences.

We nixed the festival seminars all together, but noted the Viking Series by donation to the Whistler Arts Council, such as Latte Art, Taste of Washington, Taste Australia and Cheese Please.

She’s been to wine tastings before, so we crossed off Crush, the festival’s signature event with 75 wineries and roughly half a dozen local restaurants participating. Meet the Vintners boasts the same wines minus the food and social atmosphere for half the price.

So that left us with the parties and $160 to spend.

She was looking for a local experience, so I recommended ARTrageous. The 11th annual arts bash showcases artists, performance art and live music with wine taking a bit of a back seat, but the party is young, fun and full of community members.

“But what about this Bearfoot party I keep hearing about?” she interrupts.

The infamous Bearfoot Bistro Masquerave is definitely the most talked about event at Cornucopia. There are surprises for all the senses around every turn.

Organizer Andre St. Jacques’s party sports an international reputation as a totally over the top, lavish, sexed up, must-go-to event. The party is segmented into different rooms, live DJs in one, Abbracadabra in another and nude body-painted models pouring champagne down your throat in yet another. And with this year’s Moulin Rouge theme you can expect Whistler’s bad boy to be naughtier than ever. The addition of food from award-winning restaurants such as Vij’s, Tojos and Lumiere also ups the ante this year.

Now my friend is in a dilemma. Does she drop the winemaker dinner and instead go to the Masquerave? Winemaker dinners are on the same night as the Masquerave. Winemaker dinners usually wrap up by midnight, so diners can still attend The Bearfoot party that clinks wine glasses until 4 a.m. But also keep in mind food wraps up by 10:30 p.m., so the fashionably late and winemaker dinners patrons will miss out.

Then I begin to talk about the Araxi and Divine Soul after parties. More dilemmas. Read next week’s column to find out why. n