Tastings, cellar tours, workshops and dining you book for a few hours or a day.
A Rioja barrel dinner is not a restaurant booking with a wine list attached. It is a meal served where the wine is actually made: in a rock-cut cellar that holds 13°C all year, in a dining room suspended over a barrel hall, or at a long table a guide has arranged at the end … Read more
The best wine tastings in Napa Valley are almost never the ones you can walk into. The cellar doors here take reservations, charge a fee that runs from about $30 to well past $100, and pour on a schedule. That is the trade: someone opens named bottles for you, tells you what is in the … Read more
Private cellar tours in Bordeaux cost three to ten times what a seat on a minibus costs, and the difference is rarely the wine in the glass. It is the door: who opens it, how long you stand in the barrel hall, and whether the estate takes visitors at all on the morning you happen … Read more
Almost every hotel desk sells Chianti wine tours from Florence, and most of them are the same fifty-seat coach with a stop at a tasting room that sees four of those coaches a day. The good ones are harder to spot. They cap the group, they visit estates that bottle their own wine, and they … Read more