Will travel for wine
Wine 'n Chill is an amateur collective of dedicated, or more aptly obsessive, drinkers who may or may not occasionally exceed any and all moderate consumption guidelines while still remaining prudent doing so. We care very much about what ends up in the glass and almost nothing about the ceremony around it. Preferably with our feet up.
What we are after
Nobody here is a sommelier or a broker or a credentialed anything. We are people who like to spend time following honest fermentation back to where it came from, convinced the best bottles in the world should cost neither a mortgage nor an hour of somebody's hushed and boring lecturing.
Wine travel usually asks you to pick your poison. There is the white-tablecloth version, where someone wearing a pin waits patiently for you to say the wrong thing, and there is the tour bus, careening between gift shops with a plastic cup in your hand. We wanted to avoid both, so we started this.
How we go after it
So we go small, and we go direct. Cold cellars (near-ancient or ultra-modern) crusted with lime or decorated with sophisticated art pieces, steep gravel tracks, back rooms where the vigneron draws a barrel sample and pours it into whatever glass is nearest and clean.
This is not a pitch — this is what we have experienced and yearn to have more of. Then long tables, sometimes over linen, sometimes over butcher paper, serious cooking and even more serious bottles that have rested in the same region since the day they were filled and that make you pay attention.
And why
No commercial ties, no sponsors, no tasting notes recited at the table. Wine is a product of the land (a part people often forget), and it belongs somewhere you can smell the soil it came out of, laugh without lowering your voice, and open something magnificent without having to perform for it.