Themed Wine Tastings are back

Well yesterday may have been a day for recognising geographical entities, Keir, but you can take it from Rise & Vine and our (totally Kensal) followers that no matter their rhetoric about “from the Vale to the Park” we continue to refuse to recognise Queens ***k and never will do so until their wine merchants start smiling! Our wines may be diverse and many coloured – white, pink, red, orange or green (Vinho Verde) – but this line is R.E.D.

Anyway, that’s off my chest so maybe I should tell you why I’m writing?

Wednesday Evening Themed Wine Tastings are Back

We’re going to start up our themed wine tasting evenings again. Evenings where we get together and open a few bottles of wine of a specific region, grape, style or other unifying characteristic – good with cheese, from the top shelf (yep, wine porn!) – that kind of thang.

We’d stopped doing these for a while as we’d found that interest had dropped off and – to be honest – we weren’t making any money on ‘em. But we’re getting the feedback that there’s a call for wine tasting evenings again. We’re meeting a whole bunch of new people moved into the area and lots of people are asking about tastings.

This time around, though, we’ve raised the ticket price (although each includes a £10 voucher to spend on the night, so the overall price increase is not that great) and we’ve raised the value of the wines that we’re showing: 8 rather than 6 and featuring mainly wines from the upper shelves of the shop. October’s tasting will feature 8 wines with an overall value of £200.

The theory is this: Everybody has the opportunity to slurp their way through many of our more accessible wines at our bi-monthly Saturday afternoon, free, drop-in “Open Season” wine tastings (next one November 8, btw, see below). So we’re going to use Wednesday evening themed tastings to showcase wines that you might not have had the chance to try. We’ll spend more time tasting each wine while explaining different grape varieties, regional variations, the influence of various winemaking techniques and maybe a little history, too.

So here’s the skinny: Our first themed wine tasting this Autumn will be Italian wines on the 8 of October.

Selezione Italiano Wine Tasting

Tickets £50 including a £10 voucher to spend on the evening
Wednesday 8 October, 8-10pm

Come and taste 8 wines with the guidance of the Rise & Vine team. We’ll tell you about the grape varieties, the regions where the wines are made and specific aspects of each wine’s production that give it its own particular character and maybe a little history.

Our selection of wines aims to cover a wide spectrum of Italy’s wines from Piedmont in the North-East to Puglia down in the heel, from delicate sparkling to bone-rattlingly big red. We’ve selected wines principally from the upper shelves of our shop (the more expensive shelves), so both novices of the Rise & Vine range and those who may know some of our wines very well might get to know some wines that they may not previously have had the chance to try.

You can buy tickets on our website, here, or in the shop.

More in the Tasting Pipeline

We’ve also got some more dates in the tasting diary. None of these are on the website just yet – I did say I was giving you the skinny – so we’ll be back in touch as soon as they are and we’re taking bookings, which will be soon.

“Sparklers” Wine Tasting

featuring a tasting of our complete range of Rathfinny Sussex Sparkling Wines presented by Andy Gadd of Rathfinny

Tickets £50, including a £10 voucher
Wednesday 5 November, 8-10pm

Sparklers on November 5. See what we did there? We reckon most people are off to fireworks displays at the weekend, so the actual evening seems like a good one for tasting our way through 8 sparkling wines? We’ll be presenting Murassi Prosecco, a brand new Cava, a Pet Nat, Franciacorta, Andy from Rathfinny will then present their 3 wines and we’ll finish comparing Rathfinny’s Blanc de Noir with a Blanc de Blanc Champagne.

Open Season, Autumn 2025

FREE Drop-in, Wine Tasting
Saturday 8 November, 2-6pm

Our next drop-in will feature some of those sparklers plus quite a few bangers… bigger wines suited to the nights drawing in and the temperatures dropping. Usual format: tasting trousers on and come on down. We’ll do the rest.

And [C-word]* Tastings

[C-word]* Themed Wine Tasting

Tickets £50 including £10 voucher
Wednesday 10 December, 8-10pm

Open Season, [C-word]* 2025

FREE drop-in wine tasting
Saturday 13 December, 2-6pm

*[C-word] – No not the naughty one – not what Janey Godley said about Donny-T – the other C-word… the end of year festival that we don’t mention yet. That one.