Expovina

For two weeks every November in Zürich there is a wine expo. It takes place on 12 ferry boats in Lake Zürich and each boat is filled with booths that are manned by wine importers. Each booth has anywhere from 10 to 40 different wines for you to try and anything is possible - dessert wine, port, champagne, red/white/rose, etc. When you enter the expo you are given a book containing all the importers and which wines they have and it is literally an inch thick. We were pretty overwhelmed for awhile before we came up with a plan of attack. We tried to limit ourselves to trying wines from interesting countries like Hungary or from countries where we knew we enjoyed the wine like Chile and Portugal or from Switzerland as we are trying to determine which Swiss wines we really like. But after two hours we just couldn't handle drinking any more wine though we had only made it through about 4 of the boats. We didn't make it to the rioja boat, which was special for this year and where you could learn all about rioja. I hope it comes back next year.

The expo also has restaurants, for example an entire boat is dedicated to cheese fondue and raclette (cheese is always a good idea after heavy drinking) and another is a restaurant for fish and meat delicacies. I would guess that these restaurants are not cheap ... Martin and I got ourselves some döner kebabs at a kebab stand when we were done and we thought that was the perfect way to end the evening.

I didn't take many pictures because it was crowded on the boats but here are the few I took. Here are the boats all lined up (they're one behind the other so it's hard to see that there are 12 there but you get the idea):





Here is one of the booths. The Hungarian wines. You can get an idea of how crowded it was in this pic, though this booth was on the third level of the boat which was tight to begin with: