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Melbourne Food & Wine Festival 2015 offers hands-on experiences

A pop-up waterfront bakery, global food stars, and restaurants reinvented. Melbourne Food & Wine Festival 2015 is coming.

Cathy Gowdie

Pizza maestro: Johnny Di Francesco.
Pizza maestro: Johnny Di Francesco.Supplied

Familiar places will be transformed. For 17 days, Queensbridge Square will be the festival's hub with a working bakery, space for classes and a wine and coffee bar. British baker Justin Gellatly – whose doughnuts have a cult following, and who baked the bread for the Kate-and-Wills wedding – will headline a team of international and celebrated Australian guest bakers. Gellatly will be joined by Eric Kayser, a fourth-generation Parisian master baker who oversees more than 80 Maison Kayser locations worldwide.

Expect hands-on workshops for all ages, with small classes of just 10 to 12 people, and a Little Foodies Corner with child-focused sessions on Saturdays and Sundays. Festival organisers are collaborating with Melbourne International Coffee Expo and Peter Rowland Catering will serve food and drinks day and night.

Fitzroy Gardens, meanwhile, will host 1500 lunchers on February 27, with a single table more than half a kilometre long. The food will be by Shane Delia, Adriano Zumbo and Peter Rowland Catering.

Trailblazing thinkers such as America's Dan Barber will challenge conventional wisdom about ethical and sustainable eating, while Asia's best pastry chef, Janice Wong – whose work has been described as pastry performance art – brings new meaning to the phrase "the art of cooking".

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Marriages of Melbourne food and culture will see Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play at Dan Hunter's Brae and Andrew McConnell's Cutler & Co as guests dine on food designed to match specific pieces of music, while Philippa Sibley's Prix Fixe will stage a fashion-inspired evening in collaboration with the Melbourne Fashion Festival.

The theme of discovering something new extends to a new category of the festival's signature master classes. The Essentials is a series of hands-on, intimate workshops where you can learn how to do "one thing exceptionally well" (perhaps pickling, pizza or cocktails) from acknowledged experts without investing more than $50 and the time for a single session.

Plus you can meet some of the planet's best biodynamic wine producers at Return to Terroir; discover new ways of matching food and drink with Acqua Panna "Perfect Match" sessions; and sample classic and not-so-classic varieties in two global benchmark tastings guided by some of Australia's sharpest winemaking and wine- tasting minds and palates.

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