Good Food and Wine Show Christmas Market
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https://goodfoodshow.com.au/christmas-market-melbourne/
Date Reviewed: 05/12/2025
If you walked into the Good Food & Wine Show Christmas Market on Friday night planning to "just browse" congratulations: you lied to yourself. This is not a browsing event. This is a wallet-thinning, tastebud-tempting festive ambush wrapped in twinkling lights and Christmas jingles.
The tone is set at the entrance of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre market hall: buy a glass, sling it around your neck like a badge of honour, and let the sampling marathon begin. It’s clever. It’s festive. It’s borderline evil.
A sip here, a nibble there, and suddenly you’re debating whether your pantry needs four varieties of truffle butter and a kilo of sticky chai. (Spoiler: according to exhibitors, yes. Always yes.)
Positives? Plenty. Just pace yourself.
The freebies are next-level. You can practically eat dinner in samples: cheese, marshmallows, infused honeys, chilli oils, hand-milked caviar (yes, that’s a thing), chocolate, nougat, sake… If it can be sliced, dipped, poured or wrapped, someone will hand it to you with festive cheer.
And there’s enough to fill a full day:
- Secret sips sessions by sommeliers, cheese tutorials, sustainability talks
- Michelin-ready cooking demos and shows by Miguel, Valerie Henbest and etc
- 360-degree photo booths, craft stations, a glass ring-making corner at Freezy
- Many food trucks
- 150+ stalls of temptation
You even leave with unexpected knowledge: flake is shark and endangered (thank you, GoodFish), and caviar can be gently “massaged” out of salmon using clove oil — a fact Yarra Valley Caviar will never let you forget. We ate more roe in one night than in the last decade.
And now, the downsides – prepare your credit card (and scales).
Its greatest charm is also its downfall: you will overspend.
The discounts whisper "stocking stuffer," but the impulse buys snowball fast. The only thing that saved us on Friday was the Cloudflare network outage, which stopped us seconds before purchasing a rude “Shits and sizzles cunt” apron from Kitchen Language. A blessing, really. Saved me money and a potential HR meeting.
A few damage-inflicting culprits that are hard to resist:
- Voir Vodka — especially the blueberry loukoumi flavour that ruins all other vodkas forevermore. Ask the team to tell you about Mykonos.
- The fudge stand (too many flavours, zero discipline)
- Honey Dee Loukoumades’ two-box freezer pack for $25 (“I’m robbing you,” I told Bill Moragiannis)
- Hand-harvested caviar from Yarra Valley, because… when else?
- Cookie Time’s neon-lit cookie jars the size of your head
You leave with bags, boxes, jars, and a faint sense of financial regret.
Sensory overload is real
At some point every second stall offers chocolate, and your palate stages a protest. The air smells like sugar, spice, and the collective fear of people who’ve had one too many “free” drinks before a long drive home.
Crowds balloon around hotspots — Giorgio’s Cheese looked like a dairy-themed rock concert — and queues test your Christmas spirit. The holiday soundtrack competes with blenders, sales pitches and the relentless pop of sparkling wine corks.
And then… something delicious happens and all is right in the universe again:
- A truffle honey drizzled on blue cheese.
- A cherry–blueberry juice that promises better sleep.
- A Blanc de Blancs with Belgian chocolate that shifts flavour every sip.
- A fancy marshmallow aggressively committed to raspberry.
- A pistachio-stuffed date that tastes like a Dubai holiday in one bite.
And suddenly all is forgiven.
Biggest wins
- Generous free sampling
- Lots to learn — wine, cheese, sustainability
- Unexpected finds — artisan pasta, riot-worthy marshmallows, ethical caviar
- Great gifting options, from silly to luxe
- Fun, festive atmosphere.
Biggest warnings
- You will overspend
- You will overeat
- You will queue
- You will buy things you didn’t know existed that morning
- And whatever you do, do not weight yourself the next day.
Verdict
The Good Food & Wine Show Christmas Market is festive chaos in the best possible way — indulgent, immersive, a little overwhelming, and packed with enough flavour to fill Santa’s sleigh. You go for “a few samples,” stay for the wine, and leave with gourmet loot and the slightly dazed feeling of:
Did I seriously just buy artisan marshmallows, blueberry vodka, Christmas cookies, truffle butter and caviar?
Yes. Yes, I did.
And honestly? Worth it.
The Good Food & Wine Show Christmas Market ends runs on Saturday and Sunday, 6 and 7 December from 10am to 5pm. It will be back in Melbourne from 29-31 May 2026, Perth from 17-19 June 2026, Sydney from 19-21 June 2026,
Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis