Toronto Wine & Spirit Festival

This is a great location for this festival. With nice weather the set up of booths on sugar beach is a great layout for the various wine and spirit or beer tastings. The entrance fee is pricey (20 prepurchased online and 30 at door) which includes 5 drink tickets. However, remember that each drink (wine, cocktails and beer) all cost different numbers of tickets.

I love summer in Toronto, not only because it’s the end of a long cold winter but because it marks the beginning of festival season in Toronto. This weekend I attended the Toronto Wine & Spirit Festival at Sugar Beach. It was $ 30 to attend if you decided to purchase tickets at the gate and $ 21.50 if you bought advance tickets online. With your ticket purchase you were given a wristband, 5 sample vouchers/​tickets worth $ 1 each and a plastic drinking glass. I think the Toronto Wine & Spirit Festival is one of the best summer festival for adults and here are the reasons why:
Venue: Sugar Beach was the perfect venue for this event, the weather was beautiful, sand, lots of reasonably priced alcoholic beverages and your right by the water, perfect location to have drinks and enjoy the sun.
Alcohol/​Food Vendors: There were numerous vendors serving wine, beer and spirits. Most vendors charged 1 voucher/​ticket for ½ oz and 2 vouchers/​tickets for a 1 oz drink. For the beer vendors it was 1 voucher/​ticket for half a glass and 2 vouchers/​tickets for a full glass. If the original 5 voucher/​tickets you were given as part of the admission wasn’t enough, they had booths selling additional vouchers/​tickets (5 for $ 5 or 10 for $ 10).
The food vendors were minimal, keep in mind the festival was a wine & spirit festival and not a food festival. I did get a chance to try jerk pierogies ($ 6) from the Saucy Pierogi and it was only okay, the jerk sauce was store bought imo and a lobster roll ($ 10) from Ourrr Lobster Shack which was pretty good, especially the bread.
Entertainment: One negative about the festival were the music acts, some were really hit and miss. Maybe it was the time I attended but one music act was playing something similar to folk music and it was literally putting people to sleep and then afterwards came on a R&B/Soul singer which people really got into.
This is definitely a summer festival I’ll be marking on my calendar for 2015.

This is how you run an industry tradeshow (which in essence is what the Wine & Spirits Festival is).
The founder also runs the Beer Festival at the Bandshell (coming up at the end of July).
I obtained a media pass to visit the festival and managed to sweet-​talk my way in to the VIP booth (reserved for friends/​family of sponsors and organizers).
But still, even if I hadn’t gotten in to the VIP booth, I would’ve given this festival a solid 4 stars.
Admission to the festival was $ 25 (or $ 30 at the door) and included 4 x $ 1 tickets that you could use for food or for liquor/​spirits/​wine. Most drinks cost $ 2 tickets and were a decent size (unlike some other drinks shows I’ve been to). There were also much more food options (Milagro, Rock Lobster Food Company, Spring Rolls & Berkeley Events).
This was held at the amazing Sugar Beach which was the perfect venue and featured live music as well as a DJ spinning beats next to Barefoot.
The show featured various wines (even sparkling), tequila, ready-​to-​drink cocktails, a LOT of vodka, and some pretty mean whisky (I’m looking at you Fireball).
The portapotties were located outside the venue, so no nasty messes. They were quite clean for the most part, although hand soap and paper towels did become a scarcer commodity towards the latter part of the evening.
Taps off at 11PM, but people still stuck around to enjoy the venue and music.