Classes & EVENTS
Drink to learn. Learn to drink.
event calendar
Need a date night? A new hobby? Something to break the monotony of the work week? Join us for classes taught by Sarah, Dave, and industry friends. We’re dialing down the pretension and judgmentalism, and leaning into the fun of tasting wines and learning about how they came to be. You’ll find all our classes and events over the next few months, and we update this page regularly as we add things to the schedule!
FOUNDATIONS
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If you’ve come to appreciate how wine can elevate a meal, but want to understand how wine and food interact–in both desirable and undesirable ways–then this is the class for you. As we taste through our flight, we’ll be investigating how these wines interact with various food components (salt, fat, acid, and heat, as it were). We’ll empower you with the resources to ask the right questions of wine stewards and sommeliers when you’re looking for the perfect bottle or glass to accompany your meal.
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Just for fun
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Contemporary international tastemakers have largely consolidated opinions about what makes a great red wine: boozy, rich in dry extract and glycerol, heavy with fruit and oak. Fortunately for those wine lovers with more eclectic tastes, many talented makers around the world resist homogeneity and preserve historically-prized grapes that produce light wines of mineral and spice character, aromatic punch, and high drinkability. Substance without weight, complexity without ponderousness, these and other gravity-defying sensations are on offer for the adventurous.
A native New Yorker, Oliver Longwell caught the wine bug in 2012 after a number of years working in government and politics. He has worked for leading wine retailers in New York and Los Angeles, with a particular focus on organically-farmed and natural wines. Oliver is a Certified Sommelier by the Court of Master Sommeliers and works as a freelance wine consultant. He enjoys experimenting with fermentations, especially ciders. He and his wife moved to Northeast Portland in 2021 and welcomed their first daughter in 2022 and second daughter in 2024.
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Natural wines are a major phenomenon in the wine world; such wines emphasize the influence of terroir on grapes, and low-intervention winemaking processes. This said, the world of natural wine can be terribly confusing, so we’ll be debunking some myths and addressing what makes a natty wine so “natural”. Given that producers of natural wines tend to be on the smaller scale because they rely so heavily upon hands-on (rather than purely mechanized) labor and vinification techniques, our flight will get into stuff that very well might shock and surprise your tastebuds (for better or worse!).
EUROPE
Not Europe
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While Oregon is most famous for Pinot and Chardonnay, in recent decades experimentalists have been planting grapes that are native to the more obscure (and sometimes classic) regions of Europe. These are, admittedly, the varietals that get us especially riled up when it comes to local wines, given that they’re vinified in such limited amounts. Join us on an expedition through the most exciting things happening in the Willamette Valley and Columbia Gorge!
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SPECIAL TASTINGS & EVENTS
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If you’re a Pinot or Riesling fan, this is an event that you don’t wanna miss. There are several importers whose wines we universally drool over, and the Wasserman family is at the top of our list. Technically speaking, they’re an exporter, as their headquarters is in Burgundy; of the dozen or so employees in the company, one lives abroad…right here in Portland! While Becky Wasserman single-handedly changed the landscape of Burgundian wines available in the USA over the past several decades, her family has been exploring producers (currently a mere 5!) in Germany and Italy in recent years, and have begun to bring yet-undiscovered producers to North America.
Join Timothy Davey—the most eloquent educator we know, probably because he was formed by Wasserman culture—as he and his colleague John Soares take us through Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir), Riesling, and more.
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Information coming soon!