Food, wine festival cancelled for second year in row

The Ottawa Wine and Food Festival, which still owes more than $475,000 to the Ottawa Convention Centre, will not take place next month, contrary to a statement its producer made last year when the long-standing event was cancelled at the last minute.

In an email Friday, Joan Culliton wrote: “We are looking to 2020 to reimagine the event for all the people who love the Ottawa Wine and Food Festival.” Her event’s website also says “reimagination in progress,” and little else, although it does allow visitors to sign up to receive updates.

In early November last year, the popular festival was to have staged its 33rd annual edition at the EY Centre. But Culliton said last Oct. 25 that the event would not happen, disappointing fans who had clamoured online for tickets that never went on sale.

Culliton said the event would be “taking a pause to reimagine and re-envision.

“We will be back in 2019 on Nov. 2 and 3,” she added.

Culliton’s event grew out of the Ottawa Wine and Food Show that was launched in the mid1980s and became a tradition for the city’s oenophiles and gastronomes during the first weekend in November. At its peak, the event attracted 25,000 people.

As the festival grew, though, problems emerged and relations with its landlord, the Convention Centre, soured.

A legal battle ensued a few years ago, and the centre highlighted in a 2016 affidavit that it no longer wanted the festival held on its grounds following “rowdiness, security issues, fighting, drunkenness and other problems that we do not want to have.”

The courts last year ruled against the festival. Justice Robyn M. Ryan Bell found the Shaw Centre was entitled to its claim against the festival of $156,475.25, plus interest, which the festival had owed for holding its 2015 edition at the centre.

Two months later, the judge additionally ruled that Treefort Hip Productions, the Culliton company that staged the festival, had to pay the Shaw Centre costs of $320,000.

The centre has yet to see any of that money.

“The courts ruled in favour of the Ottawa Convention Centre on all accounts in front of them,” its president and CEO Nina Kressler said Friday. “It is with great disappointment that Ms. Culliton has not met any of her obligations to pay for outstanding costs owed to the centre.”

Josh Verch, the Shaw Centre’s acting director of marketing and partnerships, clarified that Culliton owed both the $320,000 and $156,476.25 specified by the courts.

Culliton responded on Friday that the statements made by Kressler and Verch were “factually incorrect” because “there is no judgement against Joan Culliton.”

“There is a judgement against treefort hip productions, and treefort continues to review its options with regard to this matter,” she said in an email.

An investigation by the Citizen last year found the festival had other creditors waiting for payment, including a company that stored its goods, a company that washed its wine glasses, and entertainers who had appeared at its 2019 Eat Drink Spring event at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum.

The Citizen also learned that Culliton’s Eat Drink Spring events had received Celebrate Ontario grants of $48,612 in 2016 and $50,000 in 2018. Culliton’s business also received a provincial grant of $25,000 to stage a wine and food event in Kingston in 2018.

A wine and food festival did take place in Kingston in the spring of 2019, but the first annual Corks and Forks — Kingston’s International Wine Festival was not organized by Culliton. phum@postmedia.com

Twitter: @peterhum