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Beside a wall of his Gatineau warehouse, J.R. Chardon keeps more than 9,000 wine glasses.

Neatly boxed and stacked, the glasses are the property of the Ottawa Wine and Food Festival. But Chardon has had them for more than a year, since the end of the 2017 festival at the EY Centre, where crowds of well-dressed revellers ate, drank and made merry.

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Chardon says that roughly a month before the festival began on Nov. 3 last year, the event contacted his company, Edelweiss Party Rentals, about washing and sanitizing its glassware. He says he agreed to do the job, but then several weeks passed without a followup call. Finally, just a few days before the festival was to start, he received a call from the festival — “We really need those glasses to be washed,” Chardon says he was told.

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More than 1,200 dozen glasses, dirty for months according to Chardon and his staff, were brought from a storage facility in Gloucester. Edelweiss, which Chardon says had to hire extra staff for the last-minute job, washed them. Once cleaned, the glasses were brought to the EY Centre. A few days after the event ended, a smaller batch of 765 dozen dirty glasses was driven back to Edelweiss, and Chardon’s staff again cleaned them, and has had them ever since.