Introduction
Let the Feasting Begin
It seems fitting that Melbourne, a city with an almost pathological devotion to the art of eating and drinking, should host one of the world’s great food and wine festivals. This is, after all, a town that boasts seven long-running, much-loved produce markets, is surrounded on all sides by wine-producing regions, whose supporters discuss the finer points of restaurant meals with the passion of sports fanatics, get hot under the collar arguing about where to get the best pizza or dim sum and are ready to cross town to source bread or pork or cheese. It’s a city that believes ready access to an excellent glass of wine is one of the secrets to a good life and that the joys of talking about food and wine are secondary only to consuming it.
Two decades since the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival made its debut, it’s now hard to imagine March in Melbourne without the company of the world’s Best chefs and winemakers, without the classes and tastings, demonstrations and lectures, tours and special dinners, without the 400,000 other food fanatics who turn out to participate in more than 300 separate events that span the city and the state. March has become the month when the Festival holds a mirror up to Melbourne to reflect and celebrate one of the city’s great and most unique strengths.
The Chicago Tribune voted this particular festival as one of the five things you should do before you die. DAMIEN PIGNOLET, 2009
It’s hard to reconcile the size and scope of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival today with the fledgling 1993 version that produced about 10 events, some of which struggled to attract a crowd. But part of the reason that the Festival survived and now stands out on an increasingly crowded calendar of similar festivals world-wide, is that it has stuck with the same independent, inclusive and unashamedly idealistic spirit that brought the initial event into being. There’s been a firm commitment to both engage with the local industry and to include as many free events as possible to attract the largest number of people from outside of the industry.
Then there’s the way the invited talent is treated. To this day, the Festival sticks to the strict policy of paying all guests the same fee (an airfare and an honorarium) no matter what their level of stardom — or number of stars — and is adamant that every Festival guest should be whisked around Melbourne, plied with all of its greatest food and alcohol and be shown the best time possible. An invitation to the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival has become synonymous with an invitation to a good time.
But just as the Festival involves a certain amount of merriment it’s also deadly serious when it comes to food and wine. How else to explain the roll call of guests that has included Charlie Trotter and Anthony Bourdain, Elena Arzak and René Redzepi, Stephanie Alexander and Neil Perry, Heston Blumenthal and Mario Batali, Madhur Jaffrey and Henri Krug? Why else would the Festival champion organics and biodynamics, farmers’ markets, Slow Food, regionality, terroir, sustainability, food ethics, artisan producers and foraging before it became fashionable to do so? And how else to explain the way the Festival has shone light on Melbourne’s, and Victoria’s, most recognisable assets — the wine regions, the produce markets, the city’s laneways and rooftops, the coffee and bar cultures — bringing them to the attention of a wider audience?
The answers are that the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, like the city it calls home, is truly interested in this stuff.
There is a groundswell of people that absolutely love their food and wine and want to be a part of food culture … that’s how the Festival shapes itself, that’s how it grows. It’s unstoppable. JILL DUPLEIX, 2010
Yet prior to the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival coming along to celebrate and highlight this food and wine culture, this aspect of the city was largely taken for granted except by a small circle of hardcore foodies.
But then several things happened to change that: the recession of the 1990s blew into town, Melbourne lost its bid to stage the 1996 Olympic Games and Peter Clemenger, chairman of the failed Olympic bid, took the holiday he’d promised his wife they’d take at the end of the bidding process. He began to think about what he could do to help rebuild and restore pride in the city.
Weighing up Melbourne’s strengths he came to the conclusion that one of the things the city did best was events, and he “dreamt up” the plans for a food and wine festival. Back in Melbourne, Clemenger set about assembling a committee of people — restaurateur Richard Frank, wine expert Sarah Gough and food writer Jill Dupleix — to address the question of how to celebrate the city’s great innate love of food in a way that didn’t talk down to a population who were well-travelled, restaurant-savvy and aware of what was going on in the world of food.
An initial meeting in 1991 gave birth to a series of events that remain at the core of the Festival 20 years later. MasterClass, Restaurant Week (now Restaurant Express), the World’s Longest Lunch, Winemaker Dinners and the Legends of Food and Wine were all put on the table early on.
Jill Dupleix, given the nod by Clemenger to run the Festival, realised she couldn’t give the event the time it deserved and pulled back to a (still ongoing) advisory role, but not before recommending Sylvia Johnson, a restaurant owner who was known as “a good organiser with the ability to pull people together”.
That hurdle cleared the way for the inevitable funding conundrum. Five months of work had gone into the planning of the Festival and, just like the Olympic bid, it seemed as if it wasn’t going to get off the ground. That wasn’t something that Clemenger was willing to swallow again and so he decided to finance the Festival himself — and would do so for the next nine years.
“People talk about the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival being a not-for-profit organisation,” says Clemenger. “In my case I was looking at it in terms of being not-for-loss.”
One of the great triumphs of that first Melbourne Food and Wine Festival was in creating a template that helped change the way Melbourne saw itself. It didn’t reinvent the city, it just shone a spotlight on certain aspects and certain corners of the city.
In that first year the Festival held the World’s Longest Lunch on a single table for 400 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a dinner on stage at the Melbourne Concert Hall and breakfast at the Queen Victoria Market. At night the Queen Vic transformed into the colourful, lively, noisy Hawkers — Market. At the first MasterClass, hosted by the Grand Hyatt, the 32 presenters included Italian chef Giuliano Bugialli, who charmed the crowd with both his accent and pasta-making skills, and a roll call of home-grown talent like Stephanie Alexander, Greg Brown, Len Evans, Jonathan Gianfreda and Phillip Jones.
In a display of solidarity, the foodhalls of the city’s three department stores — Myer, David Jones and Daimaru — banded together to offer a progressive feast; and over the years the skills of some of the state’s top chefs — including Philippe Mouchel, Hermann Schneider, Greg Malouf and Alla Wolf-Tasker — were up for grabs in a ‘Win a Home Dinner Party’s Competition.
Jacob Freitag, Thorsten Schmidt, Adam D’Sylva, Darren Purchese, Jude Blereau, Harry Parr, Sam Bompas, Stephanie Alexander, Aphra Paine, Philippe Mouchel, Alexa Johnston, Rachel Allen, Roy Choi and Atul Kochhar, 2011.
Perhaps the most important event that first year, the one that added weight and soul and history (and perhaps even longevity) to the proceedings was the dinner honouring the Food and Wine Festival Legends, the leaders, groundbreakers and visionaries of the industry. The event was initially to be a one-off event, but it proved so popular and brought to light so many more people in the industry who deserved to be so honoured that the Legends immediately became an integral, ongoing part of the Festival’s personality.
In the lead-up to the Festival’s 10th birthday, Natalie O’Brien joined the team as CEO and soon after recruited food journalist (and now television personality) Matt Preston as Creative Director in 2005. Preston is a big man who brought huge energy to this role and an unconventional attitude towards working hours. He bombarded the Festival team with a constant flow of ideas that often arrived on the back of serviettes or beer coasters and were often overly ambitious (a plan to have waiters for the World’s Longest Lunch by the Yarra River arrive in a submarine that would surface from the water and have them all spilling out to serve was one that hit the reject pile, as was another to hang a restaurant from a crane).
That same year there were two breakthroughs that saw the Festival attain a degree of financial security for the first time. Firstly, The Age newspaper came on board as a sponsor, which assured the Festival media support and enabled it to attract a wider range of sponsors because of that support. The second breakthrough was that the Festival worked collaboratively with Slow Food International, thus increasing its profile and the support from Victorian government.
Sally Wise, Alla Wolf-Tasker, Zakary Pelaccio, Elena Arzak, Geoff Lindsay, Margaret Xu, Rosa Mitchell, Martin Boetz, Andrew Blake, Ho Chi Ho, George Calombaris, Michael Bannerman, Jun Yukimura, Rob McLeary, Angela Hartnett, Anna Hansen, Greg Feck, Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, Toshiro Konishi, 2011.
The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival has deservedly elevated itself to iconic status. It attracts the biggest names on the planet who return to their respective countries and wax lyrical about Melbourne and Victoria which provides further momentum to this incredible event. ALASTAIR McLEOD, 2009
In 2006, Melbourne played host to the Commonwealth Games and, as they were held in March, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival replaced its usual program with a more modest series of Rick Stein-led seafood events at Docklands in February. Though the Festival no-show seemed like a setback at first, it actually had a positive effect. The hiatus gave the Festival team time to take a breath and work on where to go next. It also made Melburnians realise how much they’d come to expect the Festival every March.
The Commonwealth Games also gave the Festival an opportunity to reach a wider crowd than just the hardcore food fans. At the live sites that had been set up for the Games around town, the Festival staged a series of events called the Culinary Pro-Am where teams of chefs representing various countries competed against each other to win the gold medal for cooking.
It was through the connections of some of the Festival’s regular Australian contributors that it was able to attract some of the biggest international names to the Festival. Neil Perry was instrumental in bringing Heston Blumenthal and Thomas Keller to Melbourne for the 2007 Festival, while chef Raymond Capaldi played the friendship card with his mate Anthony Bourdain to get him to front the Festival, just as Bourdain’s highly influential book Kitchen Confidential was beginning to make waves.
With the Festival also being asked to manage events like the visit by Spain’s Ferran Adrià to promote his new book, it had achieved a certain robust momentum. Adrià’s publishers were expecting a crowd of about 200 people but, in a display of Melbourne’s food fanaticism, the chef and his interpreter played to a sold-out audience at the 1,500-seat State Theatre that could easily have sold out a second time.
Melbourne's Food and Wine scene is a fundamental part of what makes Melbourne unique. It draws on our ethnic diversity, excitement for new flavours and cultures and passion for life. SHANE DELIA, 2010
With Matt Preston finishing up as Creative Director in 2009, three major committees covering gastronomy, wine and umbrella events were introduced to create the themes and directions for the Festival’s future.
The Festival has shone a spotlight on the diversity of Melbourne that has ‘engendered a great sense of community across the city’s , says Tony Tan, an integral part of the event’s creative team, tapping into both the city’s intellectual side and its readiness for a bit of food-and-wine-inspired fun. That fun now spans two decades and encompasses a state, its capital city and the memories of hundreds of thousands of Festival-goers who have come together to eat and drink communally under the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival banner. It includes all the winemakers and chefs, bakers and producers, marketers and purveyors, and writers and teachers who have gathered with their colleagues and brethren from interstate and overseas in a place where the art of eating and drinking well can be discussed and participated in passionately, knowledgeably and with an understanding that it truly is one of life’s great joys.
Peter Clemenger’s idea, conceived to help a city lift itself from the doldrums, has exceeded his wildest expectations and has helped to engender a sense of confidence, purpose and place. It has shown Melbourne to be a city that leads, reflects and listens to what is happening in the world of food and wine because food and wine are part of its lifeblood. And with no shortage of tenacity and vision, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival will continue to be a place where the world gathers to show how truly powerful the simple act of eating and drinking together can be.
Valerio Nucci, 2001.
George Calombaris, Langham Melbourne MasterClass, 2011