I Went for the Wine and Left Talking About a Tea Ceremony

Nobody warns you about the queue for oyster shucking.

I arrived at BCEC Brisbane on the Saturday, ten minutes after doors opened, and there was already a line snaking past three stalls for someone shucking oysters at speed while a small crowd filmed him on their phones like he was performing surgery. I stood and watched for a solid five minutes before remembering I actually had a plan for the day. The plan didn't survive much longer than that.

This was my first proper visit to Good Food & Wine Show Brisbane 2026, three days on offer this year instead of the usual two, and I'd gone in thinking I had it mapped out. Wine Pavilions in the morning while my palate was fresh, Good Eat Street for lunch, a couple of masterclasses in the afternoon. A sensible, adult itinerary.

It fell apart within the hour, and honestly, that's the best thing that happened all weekend.

The tasting glass situation caught me off guard too. I'd read somewhere that it wasn't compulsory and figured I'd skip it, save a few dollars, just look at the wine like a tourist admiring paintings in a gallery. Bad plan. Everyone else had a glass in hand, sampling their way through the Pavilions, and I felt distinctly like the one person at a dinner party who forgot to bring a dish. Bought one within the first twenty minutes. Should've just done that from the start.

What actually derailed my sensible itinerary was a woman at a stand near the Wine Pavilions who insisted I try a drop from a small McLaren Vale producer I'd genuinely never heard of. I wasn't going to buy anything, I told myself, definitely not before lunch. Forty minutes and two more tastings later I walked away with a bottle and her whole life story, how she'd left a corporate accounting job to help run the family vineyard, how her dad still doesn't fully trust the label redesign she pushed through last year. That's not something you get from reading a program guide. That's the sort of thing that only happens when you stop being efficient and start just talking to people.

I made it to Good Eat Street eventually, hungry and slightly buzzed from an unplanned amount of daytime wine, and immediately abandoned any pretense of a balanced meal. Ended up with a paper tray of loaded fries from one stall and a scoop of something involving Persian fairy floss from another, eaten standing up between two food trucks because there wasn't a spare table in sight. Nobody around me looked remotely bothered by their own questionable food choices either. There's a kind of shared permission that happens at events like this, an unspoken agreement that normal meal structure doesn't apply for the weekend.

The Dilmah Tea School was where things got genuinely unexpected. I sat in mostly because my feet needed a break and the chairs looked comfortable, and left forty minutes later having had an actual small epiphany about brewing temperatures. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been making tea slightly wrong for the better part of a decade. The person running the session had this quiet, patient way of explaining things that made you feel like you'd personally wronged every good cup of tea you'd ever half-arsed through a rushed morning.

By Sunday afternoon my feet had properly given up, and I still hadn't made it to the Cheese Corner, which felt like a genuine failure given how much I'd been looking forward to it going in. I did a final lap anyway, sampling my way through as many stalls as still had product left, and ran into the accounting-turned-vintner woman from Saturday again. She remembered me. Asked if I'd opened the bottle yet. I hadn't, obviously, it was sitting in my car the whole time, but the fact she remembered a random conversation from two days earlier said something about the kind of event this actually is underneath all the stalls and queues and tasting glasses.

I wrote up the practical details, exact dates, ticket types, what's actually programmed across the three days, in a proper food event in Brisbane rundown if you want the version with less wine-induced rambling and more usable information before you plan your own visit.

What I keep coming back to, though, is how much of the weekend ended up being about people rather than product. The oyster shucker. The accounting-turned-vintner. The Dilmah instructor who probably has no idea she ruined my relationship with my own kettle. None of that shows up on a schedule, and none of it was the reason I bought a ticket, but it's the reason I'd buy one again without hesitation.

It's also made me pay a lot more attention to food events in Brisbane generally, the smaller markets, the pop-up tastings, the things that never get the same fanfare as a big convention centre weekend but run on exactly the same energy. And if I'm honest, this one's cemented itself as the BCEC Brisbane events fixture I plan actual annual leave around, which is not a sentence I expected to be writing about a trade show I went to mostly for the wine.

My feet still haven't forgiven me. Worth every blister.