Chicago wine shops are on a sell-out run with multicultural wine tastings
On the first Saturday of February, about 20 of us gathered in the sunny private dining room at Uvae Kitchen & Wine Bar in Andersonville, where sommelier Asha Adisa poured us each a generous splash of bright, honeyed sparkling Chardonnay and Carignan from Black-owned Ashanta Wines in Healdsburg, California.
“I decided to give y'all your first wine before we talked about slavery,” Adisa quipped while queuing up a powerpoint on the legacy of Black winemaking in the U.S. in time for Black History Month. “No discussion about Black Americans is complete without talking about it. The labor of enslaved people is the backbone of American power as we know it.”
For the next 90 minutes, we sipped Ashanta’s invigorating, low-intervention wines — Russian River Chardonnay with creamy notes of lemon curd and sour, earthy cider from co-fermented apples and Carignan grapes — while Adisa pieced together the underreported history of African American winemaking and triumphs that prevailed in spite of systemic racism.
This included the successful, 34-year run of Virginia’s first Black-owned estate winery, Woburn Winery, which John June Lewis, the biracial son of a slave owner, opened in 1940 in Clarksville. Of the more than 11,000 wineries in the U.S. today, only about 1% are Black owned, Adisa said.
Just two days earlier at BottlesUp! in East Lake View, 40-odd fellow Chicagoans and I got schooled on Mexican wine — an emerging category with delicious exports that grace the lists of buzzy restaurants such as Mirra, Mi Tocaya Antojeria and Matilda.
Indeed, casual wine education in Chicago these days favors traditionally overlooked and under-the-radar makers and stories, and leans into nerdiness without pretense. It jumps headfirst into historical deep dives and tours lesser-known winemaking regions and globetrotting grapes; it embraces fun, sometimes oddball pairings like funky orange wine with stinky cheese and blind tastings with a “Heated Rivalry” theme.
The wine industry may still be struggling, but in Chicago, in-store wine education is alive and evolving beyond lessons rooted in the historic powerhouse regions found in California, France and Spain. There's a flourishing menu of classes representing viniculture from Baja and Hungary — and they are quickly finding an audience in our multicultural city.
“We’ve done, gosh, I don't know, hundreds, maybe over a thousand events? — and pretty much all of them sell out,” said Melissa Zeman, owner of BottlesUp!. Since opening in 2019, this cheery storefront has hosted weekly 101 classes, from wine and cheese pairings and intros to wine from the Republic of Georgia to slightly sillier takes, like “Shuck Yourself,” marrying wine with oysters. In a combo dance lesson-wine class attendees learn four dance styles, each paired with a different wine.
At BottlesUp!’s “¡Mexican Wine!” night, we learned that the very existence of Mexican wine is a "geographically fascinating conundrum,” per sommelier Alex Bliss from Grand Cata. He led the class alongside Gabi Medina from Chuchaqui Cocktails. The proximity to the equator — south of the 30th parallel — does not preclude quality winemaking, Bliss said. We began in Baja with prickly, pear-scented brut cava and crushable orange wine that tasted like “pineapple!” as someone shouted.
In a slightly controversial move, Bliss poured a blend of Chardonnay with a touch of Chenin Blanc from Coahuilo with a quality that could be considered buttery — hearkening to associations with the dreaded over-oaked Napa Chards of the 1990s. It wasn’t due to oak aging, but in fact letting malolactic fermentation run its course, lending creaminess.
“What do you all think?” he asked archly. A handful made their displeasure known via facial expressions or by emptying their portion into the spit bucket.
“I love this wine,” he added, cementing the wonderfully, maddenly subjective nature of wine tasting.
Pairing wine and food still represents a nice jumping-off point for beginner oenophiles. Indeed, during my reporting, several people suggested I pop by for a class at cheese shop and restaurant Beautiful Rind, where classes break down how to pair cheese not just with wine but beer, tea and even margaritas.
Things got nerdy from the outset at a sold-out wine and cheese pairing essentials class in late January, where all but three of the 20 attendees were first-timers. Anna Patrick, head of education and events and a cheesemonger, kicked things off as she always does — talking about how both cheese- and winemaking are processes of fermentation. Maybe that explains why they go so well together, she said.
“All the cheeses you’re tasting, and those in existence, start with the same four ingredients: milk; salt; rennet, which is an enzyme added to milk to start coagulation; and bacteria, which starts converting lactose into lactic acid,” Patrick said. “All wine is made from grapes, which are essentially pockets of sugar coated in yeast. When you crush a grape, it’s ready to become wine.”
Beautiful Rind originally thought of the wine end of its business as secondary.
“But as most people know, we sold a lot of wine in 2020, so that part of the business grew,” said general manager Kellie Freemire. Bucking the oft-repeated lament that young people aren’t into wine, attendees of Beautiful Rind’s classes skew pretty young, helped by the shop’s dine-in element, Freemire said. Of the roughly 13 classes the shop hosts each month, eight or nine of them contain a beverage element.
We sipped a rich, lemony white French blend of Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle between bites of tangy, fluffy fresh chèvre from Blakesville Creamery in Port Washington, Wis., that was still milk as of “three days ago,” Patrick said. A young woman raised her hand.
“Are all white wines made from white grapes?”
Patrick paused for a moment, then launched into a brief explanation about how wine’s hue depends on whether and how long a wine is fermented with its skins, wherein lives its color.
This detail popped into my head a few weeks later at Uvae, as Adisa poured Ashanta’s Pinot Noir Blanc, made from a grape typically used for red wine.
“This wine was separated from its skins the moment pigmentation started to show,” Adisa said. They instructed us to close our eyes and sniff in search of familiar Pinot Noir notes.
“I can smell a red!” one attendee said.
“That’s good,” Adisa replied with a laugh. “Smells like a red.”
Maggie Hennessy is a Chicago-based food and drink writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appetit and Food & Wine. Follow her on Instagram.
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