"You here for the mud wrestling?" the shuttle driver asked.
"Mud wrestling?" I repeated, weighing the box of promo gear I was to handout at a wine tasting against my primal need to watch naked women squabble in mud.
"Just get in," The driver said, and I did. It turned out he was just screwing with my emotions. There were no kiddie pools filled with mud or women to wrestle in them at the Don CeSar. There was, however, a model in pasties being painted with a scene of the wine country, but I was assured that she didn't take tips nor would she wrestle another girl covered in paint.
The Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival proved to be three full days of high class debauchery. Saturday, The Don CeSar hosted a Grand Tasting Village on the beach beneath a tent large enough to house a royal wedding. The place was consumed with the kind of people you'd find having fun in travel magazines, wearing sunglasses in the shade, floppy straw hats, sun dresses, khakis, polo shirts and white linen pants.
Not only did the soft white sand provide a cool ambiance, it also acted as a landing pad for anyone who had too much wine and for the hordes of high-end gals I couldn't afford who stepped into the event wearing heels. From behind, these perfectly tanned 40something cougars looked 20. A few looked just as young from the front with mask-sized sunglasses and distracting boob jobs. There were also plenty of younger women with professional sales jobs — wild girls all grown up but who still bore the smudged party-girl tattoos of their college years.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2008.