CHEERS: Bring us the fiesta

Auckland could well do with more food-and- wine festivals, urges Don Kavanagh.

I HAD a ball at the Taste of New Zealand festival in Victoria Park last month and it made me wonder why we don’t have more food-and-drink festivals in Auckland.

There are festivals in Hawkes Bay, Marlborough, Martinborough and so on, but there are some of us who can’t afford the time or expense of flitting about the country attending these events.

We’ve got a fantastic range of venues up here for a nice, big food-and-drink festival, especially over summer when the sun is shining and the days are long. I was particularly impressed with the Taste Festival. The food was excellent, there were some great wines, beers and ciders (and hello to the Old Mout crew from Nelson, still loving your Boysencider, guys) and, most importantly, it didn’t go on too long. The sessions were four hours long, which eliminated the biggest bugbear about festivals, the garden variety Kiwi drunk.

I worked at the Marlborough and Martinborough festivals over the years and although they may have cleaned them up a bit, they were pretty feral towards the close. Martinborough was particularly messy on occasion, with some the cream of Wellington society falling over drunk in a ditch by about 2pm.

But the Taste festival was short and to the point, ensuring a refreshing lack of the sort of boorish morons that make such festivals a chancy prospect.

Congratulations to the organisers for doing the sensible thing and ushering everyone out after their allotted four hours.

I spent a lot of my time at Monteith’s tent (again a big hello to Beth Kelly, the best duty manager in the upper North Island) and I wasn’t too fussed about queuing up to pay homage at the celebrity-chef altar.

Now if only we could have more of such events.

All the people I spoke to there enjoyed it and wished there were more of them. I know there are bijou wine-and-food festivals here, like the one in Devonport, but wouldn’t it be great if we had a nice big one to look forward to every summer right here in our own backyard?