FOOD, FUN AND WINEFEST BACCHANALIA HELPS FUEL ANOTHER BARD ON THE BEACH
WINE O’CLOCK: After rinsing with Summerhill Pyramid Winery’s Traditional Cuvée 1996, $450-aticket guests at the Vancouver International Wine Festival’s Bacchanalia gala knew exactly what they were getting into. Rather what would get into them. The glasses blanketing each banquet table would soon hold Italian and Napa Chardonnays, two American Pinot Noirs, an Italian Brunello, a Bordeaux-style Okanagan wine, a genuine 2001 French Bordeaux, an Australian Shiraz, and beddybyes beakers of 20-year-old tawny port. Complementing the cascade, Hotel Vancouver executive chef Cameron Ballendine provided a “tidal pool,” of caviar, salmon, tuna, lobster and six shellfish, followed by roast pheasant, 40-day-aged Angus beef, a “field of cheese” and six dessert confections. Whereupon, and with $280,000 reportedly raised, thirdtime chair Jana Maclagan and husband Bill, the Blake Cassels & Graydon managing partner, relaxed at that law firm’s corporate table. Benefiting the Bard on The Beach theatre company, the gustatory gala might have delighted Shakespeare’s good-life devotee, Sir John Falstaff, who nevertheless figured: “The better part of valour is discretion.”
BARDON ME: Falstaff’s “better part” line is still common today. So are others journalist-author Bernard Levin compiled in his On Quoting Shakespeare. Bard On The Beach chief Christopher Gaze got Bacchanalia started by reciting that 370-word work. In it, Shakespeare finds cold comfort and bids good riddance to bloody-minded and tongue-tied folk occupying a fool’s paradise where, without rhyme or reason, they deem it high time to play fast and loose. Google “levin quoting shakespeare” for many more.
DRESSING HERSELF: Three millennia ago, Greek poet Homer praised wines from part of present-day Turkey. Commercial winemaking resumed there in 1925, three years after starting in B.C. With some 1,000 varieties, Turkey is the world’s fourthlargest grape producer. So it was no surprise when the 12-month Turkish Consul General, Anil Bora Inan, and wife Semiha Abdullah Inan, attended Bacchanalia with U.S. Consul General Lynne Platt and husband, Jud Hamblett. Semiha even made her own gown. Not a home-sewing project, either, as the former banker-economist is now a scholarship fashion-design student at our Blanche Macdonald Centre.
PLOWING ON: Enzo Ferrari scoffed in 1963 when tractor-maker Ferruccio Lamborghini vowed to build automobiles as speedy, elegant and expensive as his own. The 69-year-old Bolognese firm still makes more trac- tors than tourers. But there are plenty of the latter, all named for fighting bulls. Lamborghini’s latest model, the Aventador S, had a one-day showing at Asgar Virji’s dealership recently. Speedy? 350 km/h. Elegant? Che bella! Expensive? That $463,775 pretax tab would cut a deep furrow in anybody’s billfold.
ATTERTON AT IT: Odysseo circus’s horses will now perform until March 12, three weeks later than planned. The show’s wild-west riding style would amuse former city-based aviation-biz official Harry Atterton, who did it for more serious purposes. He and other recruits in the Household Cavalry, Britain’s royal bodyguard corps, had to pass inspecting officers unseen by lying concealed by their galloping horses’ bodies.
Then, taking a series of low jumps while blindfolded and backward in the saddle, they uninterruptedly recited their names, ranks and serial numbers. Finally, rigged out in control-impeding breastplates, plumed helmets and thigh-high kinky boots, they trained to protect the Queen by speedily surrounding her with a bomb-and-bulletproof wall of human and horse flesh. No circus act, that.
SAVING FAITH: Time was when Andre St. Jacques all but popped a cork while bidding for the most, the best and the costliest Bacchanalia wine-auction lots. Whistler visitors paid much more for them later at St. Jacques’ Bearfoot Bistro. More composed now, he still noses for good stuff. Stepping out for a ciggy, he powwowed with former merchant banker Bill Lui, who launched the Okanagan’s One Faith Vineyards firm, then asked — and got — $165 a bottle for its debut Grand Vin 2012. It’s a classic Bordeaux blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. St. Jacques may have been angling for the unreleased 2014 vintage that Lui figures could be even better — and pricier.
YEA, NORM: Cab drivers call their trade “pushing hack.” Maybe that’s where cabbie Norman Armour got the name for the multidisciplinary, international-themed push Festival he founded in 2003 and that recently wrapped what many called its best-ever running. That’s worth a decent tip any day.
YEA, DAINA: Sayonara to Daina Augaitis who handled artist-collective Western Front’s mid-1980s exhibitions, headed Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips contemporary-art gallery, became the Vancouver Art Gallery’s chief curator and associate director in 1996, worked alongside directors Brooks Joyner, Alf Bogusky and Kathleen Bartels, and will leave Dec. 31.
YEA, BILL: After 45 years of countless hits and a few turkeys, Arts Club Theatre artistic director Bill Millerd will hang ’ em up Dec. 31, too. He embodies Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun lyrics that butchers, bakers, grocers and clerks would “gladly bid their dreary jobs goodbye for anything theatrical and why? There’s no business like show business.”