A BITTER TASTE
The sudden cancelling of the Ottawa Wine and Food Festival last month surprised many in the capital, but, as Peter Hum writes, several creditors had already been left with a bitter taste in their mouth
When this year’s Ottawa Wine and Food Festival was cancelled unexpectedly, it left would-be attendees disappointed. Behind the scenes, a number of participants and partners — including Edelweiss Party Rentals owner J.R. Chardon — say they’re still waiting to be paid for previous events.
Beside a wall of his Gatineau warehouse, J.R. Chardon keeps more than 9,000 wine glasses.
Neatly boxed and stacked, the glasses are the property of the Ottawa Wine and Food Festival. But Chardon has had them for more than a year, since the end of the 2017 festival at the EY Centre, where crowds of well-dressed revellers ate, drank and made merry.
Chardon says that roughly a month before the festival began on Nov. 3 last year, the event contacted his company, Edelweiss Party Rentals, about washing and sanitizing its glassware. He says he agreed to do the job, but then several weeks passed without a followup call. Finally, just a few days before the festival was to start, he received a call from the festival — “We really need those glasses to be washed,” Chardon says he was told.
More than 1,200 dozen glasses, dirty for months according to Chardon and his staff, were brought from a storage facility in Gloucester. Edelweiss, which Chardon says had to hire extra staff for the last-minute job, washed them. Once cleaned, the glasses were brought to the EY Centre. A few days after the event ended, a smaller batch of 765 dozen dirty glasses was driven back to Edelweiss, and Chardon’s staff again cleaned them, and has had them ever since.
Chardon says he would have returned the glasses to the festival, except for one thing: Edelweiss has not been paid the $11,672.90 it invoiced the festival for the cleanings, he says.
In January this year, Chardon brought the matter before small claims court. In May, the festival filed a defence, contending Edelweiss over-billed for its work, charging $5 per dozen glasses washed instead of $3 per dozen. A trial date has yet to be set.
The matter of the wine glasses is just one piece of the financial picture around the wine and food festival — the 2018 edition of which failed to take place last month.
The event was to have kicked off its 33rd annual edition at the EY Centre on Nov. 2 this year. But Joan Culliton, the festival’s producer, told this newspaper on Oct. 25 that the 2018 event would be cancelled — to the disappointment of fans who had been clamouring online for tickets that never went on sale.
“We’re taking a pause to reimagine and re-envision the event,” said Culliton, who runs the festival’s events with a small staff. “We will be back in 2019 on Nov. 2 and 3,” she added.
However, before Culliton’s event can be staged once more, it must contend with financial challenges far more daunting than Chardon’s suit.
Weighing on the festival are a judge’s decisions, handed down this fall, in the dispute between the festival and downtown Ottawa’s Shaw Centre, where the event was held before it moved to the EY Centre, near the airport, in 2016. The Shaw Centre is entitled to its claim of $156,476.25 owed by the festival for holding its 2015 edition at the centre, plus interest at the rate of 18 per cent for each year from Dec. 10, 2015, Justice Robyn M. Ryan Bell ruled in early September.
For its part, the festival counter-sued the centre for $9.6 million in damages, alleging the centre had been in breach of the contract and that the festival should have been allowed to remain at the Shaw Centre. The judge dismissed the festival’s claim.
Additionally, on Nov. 2 — the day that the wine and food festival was to have begun — Ryan Bell ruled that Treefort Hip Productions, Culliton’s company that stages the festival, must pay the Shaw Centre costs in the amount of $320,000.
The Shaw Centre has yet to see any of the money owed, its president and CEO Nina Kressler said in an interview.
“Our legal counsel are back in forth,” Kressler said. “Our instructions are to vigorously pursue the judgment.”
Contacted last month, Culliton declined to comment on her company’s debt to the Shaw Centre.
Edelweiss has not been paid the $11,672.90 that it invoiced the festival for the cleanings.
Meanwhile, this newspaper has spoken to six other businesses or individuals contending, as Edelweiss does, that they are owed money by the festival.
These self-described creditors include the Gloucester storage company holding the festival’s assets, an Ottawa furniture maker who built tables for last year’s festival, a charcuterie company from last year’s festival, a food truck that sold Wagyu beef burgers at the festival’s Eat Drink Spring event in May, and a mixologist and a musician who appeared at a Mother’s Day Weekend gathering at the Canadian Agriculture and Food Museum. Together, they contend the festival owes more than $25,000 to them.
Emailed a summary of the contentions by these businesses, Culliton countered: “There are factual errors in the contentions ... These are private commercial matters and I offer no further comment.” When asked to elaborate, she did not reply.
A few other vendors spoke of good relations, good experiences and no debts regarding their dealings with the festival. Others said that they wouldn’t return to the festival because they consider the event too expensive to attend.
“We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of exposure,” said Rhonda Froment-Beare of BBQ Babes, a Kingston-based vendor at the 2017 EY Centre event.
However, Froment-Beare was less pleased with the financial aspect of the event. BBQ Babes, she said, paid $2,000 for its booth at the festival.
“We were very disappointed in the sales, though … it was almost heart-wrenching how little (business) we did do,” she continued. “We lost money.”
The festival and the Eat Drink Spring event sold guests tickets that were swapped for food or drinks from vendors. Then, vendors returned the tickets to the festival, which would tally them up — typically by weighing them, vendors say — and pay out the vendors.
“I think it took ’til mid-January 2018 for us to get paid,” Froment-Beare said. “I made sure I got paid. I hounded them.”
Froment-Beare said she would only consider taking part in another festival event if it were held in downtown Ottawa, rather than at the EY Centre.
“And I would not be paying what I paid last year to be in it,” she said.
Laura Bradley, co-owner of King’s Lock Craft Distillery near Prescott, said her small, family-run company would have sold its spirits last month at the EY Centre had the festival taken place. Just a few days before its Nov. 2 start date, her company was told that the event was cancelled.
“We assumed it was cancelled before we found out it was officially cancelled,” Bradley said.
King’s Lock had paid the festival an $1,800 booth fee in August, Bradley said, and is waiting to be reimbursed.
“That’s not inconsequential to a business like us, to shell out two grand and still be waiting for it to come back,” Bradley said.
“We were told we would be fully refunded. We will obviously be pursuing that.”
In 2008, when Culliton bought her event from Player Expositions, it was one of the largest shows of its kind in the country.
Launched in the mid-1980s by Robert and Halina Player, the Ottawa Wine and Food Show, as it was then known, became a tradition for the first weekend in November. The Players were ahead of their time in advocating for wine and gastronomy in Ottawa, and their company, Player Expositions, attracted capacity crowds of about 25,000 to the Ottawa Congress Centre, now the Shaw Centre.
Culliton was well-acquainted with the event before she bought it. She was formerly the Congress Centre’s executive vice-president and head of expansion, but left that position in May 2007. While the Congress Centre was reconstructed in the late 2000s — it would be renamed the Ottawa Convention Centre and later the Shaw Centre — Culliton held her event at Lansdowne Park, typically presenting the wares of more than 200 exhibitors to the thirsty and famished.
In 2011, the event returned to its downtown digs at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Culliton rebranded it as a festival and expanded it to run five days. That year, TV celebrity chefs including Lynn Crawford and Bob Blumer dropped by. The following year, Montreal star chef Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon fame was featured at a special festival dinner.
However, as the event grew, problems emerged and its relations with its landlord soured.
In 2012, some general admission ticket-holders were stalled in lineups for as long as two hours to get in on the Friday and Saturday nights. Some patrons were patient but upon making it in, had only 90 minutes or so to enjoy the event before it ended for the night. Others gave up on getting in. The festival refunded money to some ticket-holders.
And the Convention Centre had already grown far less keen on the event, with issues such as rowdy attendees weighing on it.
The centre in early 2016 filed an affidavit for its court battle with the festival, in which it said “rowdiness, security issues, fighting, drunkenness and other problems that we do not want to have at the Shaw Centre” had emerged a few years earlier.
In December 2011, Culliton was advised that she would be allowed to hold the festival at the centre for just one more year, but she reached an agreement and would stage the festival downtown for four more years. At the legal proceedings in 2016, Convention Centre staff testified that the 2015 festival had problems with over-pouring of alcohol by exhibitors, intoxicated attendees and even instances of public urination and vomiting.
“How bad does it have to get before my client has the right to say enough?” the Shaw Centre’s lawyer, Andrew Lenz, argued. “How much vomit do we have to have?”
Culliton took the event to the EY Centre, near the Ottawa International Airport, for 2016 and 2017.
By then, the festival was no longer as lucrative or as optimally located as it had been, say former vendors, such as restaurateur Randy Fitzpatrick, owner of Petit Bill’s Bistro on Wellington Street West.
Fitzpatrick says his business did well at Culliton’s event during the early years of her run.
“Our goal was always to break even and make a little money. We did that big time at Lansdowne. We did that the first and second year at Shaw Centre,” says Fitzpatrick, who sold items such as lobster poutine from his booth.
Because of the long lineups at the 2012 event, admission was staggered the following year. But the new regimen hurt sales, Fitzpatrick says.
“There was a three-hour window where we didn’t sell a thing.”
That was the last year Petit Bill’s sold food at the festival.
“We bowed out of it.”
Still, Culliton asked Petit Bill’s if it would take part at the EY Centre with a “free booth,” Fitzpatrick says. He declined.
“The EY Centre is the absolute wrong place in the city to stage an alcohol-based event,” he contends.
In September 2017, furniture-maker Austin Thompson received a request from Culliton and began building tables in his backyard workshop.
There are factual errors in the contentions ... These are private commercial matters and I offer no further comment.
“I worked nights and weekends,” says Thompson, who also works in construction.
An expert in repurposing vintage materials, he says he built about a dozen pieces of furniture for the festival. Some were long, high-top tables made with pine slabs and bases wrapped in barn tin. He built tables from French oak wine barrels for displaying bottles and cheese, and stools from tractor seats, he says. From an antique eight-foot toboggan he made a one-of-a-kind bar table. A video posted by the festival to Facebook describes that table as “an exquisite vintage bar for our vineyard chic decor.”
Culliton, he says, was pleased with his work and praised him for it. Thompson says he charged her $8,500. But he says he has only received a bounced cheque, cheques that bank personnel told him would have bounced, and emails from Culliton thanking him for his patience.
Thompson shared some emails from Culliton with this newspaper. A Dec. 23, 2017 email said, “Thanks Austin. I will get your cheque shortly. Best of the Holiday Season.” A March 20, 2018 email from Culliton proposed that she pay in instalments over three months. No cheques came, Thompson says.
In a May 28 email, Culliton apologized and wrote that she was “in the midst of a timing issue with respect to paying.” She wrote that she hoped to pay Thompson, with interest, at the end of June. In a July 9 email, Culliton requested an additional two weeks to pay.
In October, four cheques — one current and three post-dated — were dropped off at Thompson’s house. “With immense thanks for the stunning furniture you created for us,” Culliton wrote in an Oct. 1 email. However, one cheque bounced, Thompson says.
Thereafter, he took the post-dated cheques to Culliton’s bank to have them certified, but says he was told each time that there wasn’t enough money in the account to cover the cheque.
The $8,500 Thompson is owed makes up a quarter of his wages for last year, he says.
“I only made $30,000,” Thompson says. “I still try to trust people all the time. I never ask for money up front . ... I guess I will have to change a little bit, at least get material costs up front.”
He says he might pursue the money in small claims court.
“I think about it every once in a while and it keeps me up at night sometimes,” he says.
But, he says he is not optimistic about being paid.
At the 2017 Ottawa Wine and Food Festival, a marquee exhibitor was Seed to Sausage, the Charbot Lake-based charcuterie company. Its founder, Mike McKenzie, says he has known Culliton for eight years.
McKenzie says he has received most of the money he was owed from the 2017 event, although he didn’t receive a cheque until late May this year. That cheque cleared, but a second, post-dated cheque bounced, McKenzie says. He contends he is owed about $2,000, but has written it off.
The wine and food festival “was a good event and Joan was trying really hard,” McKenzie says.
However, following the move to the EY Centre, it felt like the event was “going in the opposite direction,” McKenzie says. The location was not as nice as the Shaw Centre, and there was lack of “strong vendors,” he says.
“It was heartbreaking to see it struggle like that,” McKenzie says. “I would much rather see the show live on.”
McKenzie says he would take part in a future wine and food festival.
“I think Ottawa needs something like that. I don’t need to do it for financial reasons, I don’t need to do it for promotion . ... I would love to help make that an amazing event in Ottawa.
“But I can’t give money away to make it happen,” McKenzie says.
Niagara-based PondView Estate Winery’s Joseph Barbera tells a similar tale of his dealings with the wine and food festival.
PondView has been vending at Culliton’s event for seven years, says Barbera, the winery’s operations manager.
“Ottawa is a great market for us,” he says.
PondView basically broke even when it exhibited at the Shaw Centre, but its sales dipped at the EY Centre, especially last year.
Barbera says PondView did receive the $9,000 it was owed by the festival, but only after five months, many phone calls, and his own trip to Ottawa to collect.
“I hate to chase people for money,” Barbera says.
Ottawa-based Maverick’s Donuts was strikingly featured at last year’s festival with a 10- by 14-foot wall covered with 600 doughnuts.
“Some of the drunks would take bites out of them,” says Geoff Vivian, the owner of Maverick’s, which wasn’t charged a fee to vend at the 2017 festival.
“Build a doughnut wall for us. We’ll pay for it,” is what Vivian says he was told by the festival. Culliton, Vivian adds, had requested an even bigger doughnut wall, but it wasn’t possible to build. Maverick’s bill for the wall came to almost $2,000, Vivian says. But Culliton reneged on paying that amount, he alleges. Then, Culliton agreed to pay 75 per cent of its ticket sales, Vivian says.
“Then she ended up giving us (a) 50-50 (split),” Vivian contends.
It took three months for Maverick to be paid by the festival, Vivian says.
“I’ll just take my money and not do it again,” he says.
In a separate email, Culliton disputed Vivian’s account, responding to a summary: “Your facts are incorrect.” She did not reply to a request for elaboration.
This year, on the Mother’s Day Weekend, Culliton staged the festival’s fourth annual Eat Drink Spring event, this time in partnership with the Canadian Agriculture and Food Museum. According to a list posted by the Ontario government online, the event received a Celebrate Ontario grant of $50,000.
However, some businesses that took part came away sorely let down by monetary matters.
“The most disappointing part about it was just the fact that it was so over-sold” as an opportunity to make money, says Hind Mubarak, who owns the Vanitea Room, a Somerset Street West tea salon and eatery.
Mubarak says her business drew up an initial plan, based on discussions with the festival, forecasting revenues of $15,000 to $20,000 for providing food at Eat Drink Spring. In the end, the job was scaled back to about $3,000, which scarcely covered the Vanitea Room’s costs, Mubarak says. The money owed has been received, she says.
The turnout at the event, Mubarak says, was meagre.
“The first day I was there for a mere few hours, and it was incredibly quiet,” she says. “The next day was even more quiet.”
Laura Bradley, co-owner of King ’s Lock Craft Distillery, felt sufficiently positive about her experience at Eat Drink Spring, and the 2017 festival at the EY Centre before that, that she was ready to vend again at the cancelled festival last month.
Bradley was paid the $400 that her business made at Eat Drink Spring, she says. She says she only faults the festival for holding Eat Drink Spring over two days instead of just the Saturday.
Regarding forecasts of large crowds, Bradley says: “I think event organizers always overestimate — always, always, always, always. Every event we’ve done, the crowds have never been what people tell us. We’ve sort of learned to tame our expectations.”
Another Eat Drink Spring vendor, two musical attractions at the event, and a mixologist told this newspaper that as of mid-November, they were still owed money by the event.
One of them is the food truck from Kingston-based Otter Creek Farms, which raises high-end Wagyu cattle. After selling burgers, poutine, fries and more at Eat Drink Spring, truck staff turned in almost 3,500 tickets and are still owed $3,450, says the truck’s co-owner Dayna Scott.
A May 28 email from Culliton, responding to Scott’s query about payment, simply says: “We send out within 30 days of the event.” But six months later, Scott says she still hasn’t received a cheque.
Scott also feels let down because her truck’s sales were less than expected.
“We were promised this great exposure. We were told there would be thousands and thousands of people,” Scott says.
In addition to the revenues yet to be received, Scott said the truck incurred costs of about $1,000, including wages for employees, hotel lodging for them, gas and more.
“We went up there with our product and to not be reimbursed, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth,” Scott says.
Toronto violinist Eugene Draw, who performed at Eat Drink Spring under his stage name Dr. Draw, and Ottawa mixologist Erick Romolock, were less perturbed about the money that they say is yet to come to them from the event. Draw says he is owed $1,600, while Romolock says he is owed about $700.
Sandy Schlieman’s three teenage daughters, who make up a musical act called Triple Trouble, also performed at Eat Drink Spring. Schlieman charged the event $500 for two performances, but says she was not paid for six months despite repeated emails and calls.
Last month, a day after this newspaper contacted Culliton to seek comment, Schlieman received an email from Culliton saying that she had dropped a cheque in her mailbox.
“The cheque for Triple Trouble ... was written out to my daughter who is away at university,” Schlieman says. “We therefore have been unable to process the cheque.”
This newspaper asked the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum if it was owed money by Treefort Hip Productions. The museum “is not owed any money,” replied Christine Clouthier, a media relations officer for Ingenium, Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovations.
Had Culliton wanted to stage her event at the EY Centre last month, she would almost certainly have needed access to her cache of thousands of glasses, picnic tables, plastic spit barrels and more that are kept at AMJ Campbell Self Storage in Gloucester.
Geoff Beament, the company’s president, says it has consolidated the festival’s belongings into a trailer. However, Beament says that for now, the goods are staying in the trailer because the festival is about $10,000 in arrears in paying its storage bill.
“The bottom line is her stuff ’s not leaving this warehouse until that storage bill is paid,” Beament says. “It’s the only collateral I have for the receivable.”
Beament says he has outsourced the task of getting money owed by the festival to an accounts receivable management company, which may well pursue the matter in small claims court.
However, Beament has faint hopes about his company seeing its money.
“It’s not like I expect anything out of them ever again,” he says.
In her recent communications with this newspaper, Culliton has referred to three events envisioned to take place in 2019.
One is a fall 2019 edition of the festival. Similarly, the festival’s website says: “The 2018 Fall Edition will be re-imagined and re-launched for 2019. November 1-3, 2019. Watch for news!” The webpage provides no further details, but invites people to sign up for a mailing list.
“We are excited about the Kingston event taking place in February 8th and 9th 2019,” Culliton wrote this newspaper last month.
She’s apparently referring to the inaugural Kingston Wine and Food Festival, which the list of 2018 Celebrate Ontario grant recipients noted had received a $25,000 grant.
That list noted that the event was to have taken place on the same weekend as the Eat Drink Spring event in Ottawa. Meanwhile, an April 2018 story in the Kingston Whig-Standard said the $25,000 grant would “help the brand-new Kingston Wine and Food Festival (Nov. 14-17) get on its feet.”
Interviewed in Kingston, Culliton told the Whig-Standard that the grant would be used to educate the festival’s consumers about the “excellence of domestic products.”
In early November, this newspaper sought details online regarding the Kingston Wine and Food Festival, but could find none. Tourism industry personnel in Kingston drew blanks about the event when they were asked about it.
The event did not take place last month.
Asked by this newspaper for more details about the event she says is to happen in Kingston in February, Culliton did not reply.
Denelle Balfour, media relations officer for the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, said the ministry is aware that the Kingston Wine and Food Festival’s dates changed. Recipients of Celebrate Ontario support that make changes to their events must receive approval from the ministry, Balfour said.
If an event does not take place, the ministry requires any funding paid to the recipient to be refunded, Balfour added. The ministry has not provided funding to the Ottawa Wine and Food Festival or Treefort Hip Productions, Balfour also said.
In her emails to this newspaper, Culliton signs off with notice of a third event next year: “Eat Drink Spring! May 2019.”
I still try to trust people all the time. I never ask for money up front. ... I guess I will have to change a little bit.