Hundreds of foodies waited patiently at Mudgee's bus stops in the chilly winter air on Saturday, waiting for their lift to the smoked meat and wine event known as MudgeeQue.
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The second MudgeeQue event, held this year at 'Evamor' on Tinja Lane just outside of Mudgee was a sellout event, drawing plenty of tourists to the area during a time that is usually pretty quiet for the region.
Ray Whitfield, part of the organising committee for MudgeeQue said of all the tickets they sold, 70 per cent were from people outside of Mudgee, a great bellwether for success.
"The reason for running the event when we do is to try and attract more visitors to Mudgee in a time which is normally quiet. So my measure of success - apart from people enjoying the event - is that do we get lots of visitors," he said.
"If you measure success by the purpose of the event being achieved, ie, to get more people to come and stay in Mudgee in a quiet time, then yes it was a success."
MudgeeQue sold its allotment of tickets quite quickly, of course due to its popularity but also because, as Ray said, the scale of the event is carefully managed.
"You can't get everything right. But we try and make sure that there are sufficient food and wine stores for people to get served in reasonable times. I did get one complaint from somebody who said they waited for an hour or something. But most people seemed to wait 20 to 30 minutes maximum to get food," he said.
"We try and make sure that we link together the numbers of stalls and the numbers of people. So next year - we will add more stores next year.
"We're limited a bit by having space and also getting the appropriate stalls, we may go a few more - we had 2000 adult tickets we sold and we gave away 200 tickets to children under 11. So 2200 people. We might go up to 2400 or 2500. But that probably would be about the limit"
Planning for next year's event is already in the very early stages and Ray expects the slightly expanded event to be just as popular.