I saw an ad online for a wine and cheese festival called “Mould x Pinot”

I had stayed at this hotel quite a number of years ago for a business conference and I do remember they had pictures of the EKKA on the wall and quite cute pictures of animals on the bed cushions.

I remembered that my room back then had a cute duck on it. Or so I thought, until that duck scared the #*!% out of me when I woke up in the middle of the night, only to have eyes staring at me.

Our room this time had a very cute little pig on the cushion, but I did make sure he was facing the wall so as to not alarm me.

When knew we did not have very far to go to get to the festival (only around 80 meters) but at one point, M glanced out of the window and said “We should go right now look at the queue”

Indeed, it was stretched out around the corner and was probably a good 150- 200 meters long.  The map below shows how long the queue was with the red line

Good thing I had bought “skip the queue” tickets so we quite smugly walked right past that very long queue to our “Brie-I-P” entrance where we received a special wristband, a tote bag which contained lots of pamphlets of the stall holders, as well as a glass for all our tastings and chiller bag for our cheese and then, literally, the velvet rope was opened and we were allowed onto the red carpet before entry.

At one point through the day, I did hear two girls talking, and one of them had said it took them almost an hour to get in so the skip the queue ticket was definitely worthwhile.

The festival was as big as I hoped it was going to be and was split up over two full pavilions. The first pavilion was all the cheese each stand gave tastings of varying sizes. Some places had just small tastings on a “paddle pop”stick, while others had tastings on half a cracker.

All the stalls had their cheese available for sale, and we did buy quite a few.

Over the next day or so I will vacuum pack all the cheeses so they will last quite some time

The second pavilion had the wine and again each stall had tastings of around 30ml or so in the bottom of our glass and also wine for sale. At most of the stalls you could purchase a 150ml pour or by full bottles

The wine pavilion was much busier than the cheese pavilion, but it was still fairly easy to get in for tastes. Many of the stalls had the technique of rather than just standing behind their stand they would come out and gather six or so of us and pour us all a taste, and then they only had to explain the wine to a group rather than individuals. I found that much better as in the small group we would talk to each other, and they comment on other wines that had been tasted at other stalls.

I had finished a tasting at one stand and turned around to find M. He asked what was next, and I pointed and said I had seen smoke in that direction, there must be a barbecue.

Sure enough there was and we had very yummy teriyaki Wagyu skewers.

We were lucky and managed to find one chair at a shared table that I sat on and it was not long until other people at the table left, and M was able to sit as well.

That would be about my only recommendation for the festival organisers is that there could be just a couple more food options.

While we did not see anybody actually drunk. There was a few tipsy people around towards the end of the day and I think food may have helped alleviate that a little.

Back into the pavilion for some more tastings and we ended up at the rear of the pavilion only to find a large lounge area with plenty of empty tables and chairs labeled Brie-I-P lounge.

We asked the guy at the entrance and he saw our wrist bands, and said yes, this was for us. Yay.

One clever idea, they had was a wine and cheese check station. Just like a coat check you could leave your wine and cheese here rather than carrying it around.

Another fun thing was the Social Media Wall.   It was busy all day with lots of people taking fun photos for their social media.  I decided to follow the trend 🙂

A few more tastings and the purchase of a very nice bottle of Pinot Shiraz we made our way back to the hotel.

We managed to fit all our purchases into the little mini fridge without having to remove all of the mini bar.

It was a little bit early to have dinner, but we went down to Bar Gusto just to have a drink and relax.

From the top of the street, we could see that right down King Street was lined with bars, cafés, and restaurants, but we did not feel like walking much more today. We decided we would investigate all them in the morning before we checked out.

We had a lovely dinner at the 6 acres restaurant at the hotel and turned in for a reasonably early night around 9 o’clock

The next morning we had our showers and made our way down for buffet breakfast. We were not in a hurry this morning as we did not need to leave until around 10 o’clock or so as we were going to a birthday lunch on Bribie Island.

The buffet breakfast had the usual fare of tomatoes, mushrooms, hashbrowns, sausages, baked beans, and scrambled eggs. It was explained to us that chef would cook eggs anyway we wanted as well. There was also a good bread selection, cereals, and continental selections of cold meats, fruits, nuts, yoghurt, etc.

It wasn’t until after I had served myself that I noticed there was also a hot box with pancakes and maple syrup, of which M had two servings

After breakfast, we took a walk right down King Street to see all the shops bars, cafés, and restaurants. There are so many really nice options here that we have made the decision that we will come back just to eat on King Street. I particularly like the look of Le Montrachet and M liked the menu of burgers at Dirty Harry’s

Back to the hotel, we checked out just after 10 and made our way to Bribie for lunch. After such a big buffet breakfast, both of us only had entrées for lunch.

By the time we finally got home it was just after 3 o’clock. We unpacked our bags and said what a great weekend we had had and we’re really looking forward to doing it again.

Bonus!!

At work on Monday I got an email from Rydges with their current specials.

The same room as we just had plus breakfast plus a $25 food/beverage voucher for just $249 a night. Yes please we have booked to go back on the weekend of the 26th till 28 June. Bring on King Street food.