Drink More Art
How Vine Bar Is Making Wine Approachable This Summer
By Kylie Stoltzfus
If you ask Justina Latura, owner of the Lancaster City-based Vine Bar, the rules of wine don’t matter nearly as much as the stories behind each bottle.
“Don't get bogged down by the rules that you've heard,” Latura says. “Some of them aren't even real.”
Committed to supporting small natural wine producers, Latura is building relationships with the growers and winemakers she sells at the shop. Each bottle is made without pesticides or additives and is sold in Pennsylvania directly from Italian producers with whom Latura has shared meals, sipped wine, and walked the vineyards they tend.
While Latura is a fan of ignoring any perceived rules, she does have a few suggestions of how to best savor a summer pour.
First, pair a meal to the wine you’re craving. Instead of searching for the right wine to pair with your summer meal, build a meal crafted around what you want to drink.
Second, pop more bubbles. Bubbles can be sipped throughout an entire meal and carry you well into the end of an evening—except alongside cake. Latura says that the sugary dessert can easily overpower a sweet sip.
Finally, if you’re struggling to toss your preconceived notions or intimidations of wine aside, start your journey at Wine 101, a monthly wine club hosted at Vine Bar.
Laura’s love of wine was born in the same environment she is now creating for her guests—around the table during a wine study hosted by a friend, discussing the nuances of each pour, and developing a near insatiable love for learning about wine almost as much as she loved to drink it.
The first session of Vine Bar’s eight-month Wine 101 is a deep dive into how to taste wine.
“[We] usually taste somewhere between six [to] 12 wines per class just to get people used to learning how to taste wine,” Latura says. “It is a series you can jump in anywhere. Each class is standalone, but it is designed to kind of build your knowledge class-by-class.”
“The whole program is kind of designed to give people a very conducive entry point into the world of wine,” says Bailey Place, Vine Bar’s sommelier. “The first three classes have nothing to do with grapes or varieties or anything like that. It's purely the history, why it's served the way it served, even down to why you use glassware.”
However, you don’t need to attend the class to begin learning these principles.
Upon walking into Vine Bar, guests are welcomed to the bar, where they can look through the menu with Place’s assistance, guiding them through what is currently on rotation and sharing information about the many steps taken to get from vineyard to bottle. The menu is created with intention, featuring 15 by-the-glass options for guests to choose from. While that may sound intimidating to some, Place is determined to take the pressure off drinking wine by guiding guests to a few options they might be interested in trying based on each person’s unique preferences.
“We are there to be guides as much as people want to be guided, but it is meant to be very accessible,” Place says. “I love to teach people how to taste and what these terminologies mean, so that even when they go to a different restaurant, they know a little bit more on how to order a wine they like.”
While pouring, Place talks to guests about the history of each bottle, where the wine originates from, and the producers who created what they’re about to taste.
“One of our mottos is Drink more art,” Place says. “These are farmers and these are craftsmen [and] for that bottle of wine to happen is a multitude of thousands of decisions over potentially years just to put one single bottle together. And I think that's inspiring in its own right, to say that, although I bought this off the shelf for $20 and I poured in a glass… you're drinking something that has history and artisanship, and I mean literally years of someone's life behind it.”
This summer, Place says that, “Fresh is king” and recommends opting for whites, rosés, light reds, and bubbles.
“The more bubbles you can pop in the summer and even pair it with multiple dishes, the better day you're going to have,” Place says. “It's refreshing. It's fun. Who doesn't love bubbles in the summer?”
Place continues, “I love to bring wine down to a level where you can just drink it casually. If you have a bonfire out back in the summer… pull a bottle of wine, enjoy it, pass it around. It doesn't need to be this luxurious thing like everybody thinks. It can be a very casual drink and be very fun in that way, just like beer [or] spirits.”
“What we try to do at Vine Bar [is] make [wine] really accessible and help people approach it from wherever they're at,” Latura says. “Wine has become such a bougie thing, almost where, [if] you don't have the vocabulary or you don't know what to do, you can feel really awkward or uncomfortable… We just want people to come into our very casual space [and] learn about great wine, get a little education, have a great time doing it, and not feel intimidated.”
Break the wine-rules this summer. Visit Vine Bar at 237 N Prince Street in Lancaster City.
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