Gourmet Festival, food that is music to your tummy
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Well, this year’s fifteenth Gourmet Festival, as always, offered us some new, delicious and interesting things. For starters, the opening night was held at the hotel Casa Velas and the setting was delightful, a lounge ambiance around the poolside that made you feel like you were in a new place, an unknown new venue.
There were other new items added, like the dinner safari, in which you had hors d’oeuvres at one spot, soup or salad at another; main course at still another location and dessert at yet one more of the leading Vallarta restaurants, so in one night you could get to know four of the best dining spots in town, one safari by van and another on foot, all arranged according to the geography of the tour..
But the one thing that truly got my attention was the Winemaker’s night. Because you got to meet a new special breed of people, the oenologists.
They are the scientists that know the land, the components of the soil, the altitude, the temperature and the timing and of seasons and rain. They know what grapes can be grown and where; how and when they ripen. They know when to harvest to the day, the time of day, or even the time of night.
Spending time with Bernhard Güth from Trío and Vitea restaurants as well as with Joaquín Prieto, producer of Vinos Tres Valles winery in the Valle de Guadalupe, Baja California, was an intense immersion course on wine making, wine tasting and food and wine pairing.
When I went with Bernhard and Joaquín on a degustation visit with the sommelier, chef and maitre d’y of the San Angel Hotel; a most charming and unique inn that really belongs in the very heart of Puerto Vallarta; as they went through the menus and chose the wines to go with them, the experience took me back in time to when I watched the movie “Amadeus” about Mozart. Antonio Salieri, his rival, was mesmerized by Mozart’s music, just by reading the sheet music he knew the beauty of it and the genius of Mozart without ever having heard it.
Being an amateur musician and wine lover I can only hope that these experiences will enable me to enter my next reincarnation with the benefit of a handicap on those intricate fields.
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Eduardo Rincón- Gallardo
E-mail: toureps@prodigy.net.mx
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There were other new items added, like the dinner safari, in which you had hors d’oeuvres at one spot, soup or salad at another; main course at still another location and dessert at yet one more of the leading 
When I went with Bernhard and Joaquín on a degustation visit with the sommelier, chef and maitre d’y of the San Angel Hotel; a most charming and unique inn that really belongs in the very heart of 