November’s partner is winery/distributor is The Vinho - a local importer of Portuguese wines. Here is a snippet of their story:

It all started - as many entrepreneur stories have lately - during quarantine...

We actually fell in love with Vinho Verde wines when we got ‘stuck’ in Portugal in 2020 – we were living in London when Leigh got pre-approved for his green card to come to the States…the day before the UK went in to lockdown!  

So, having already handed in our notices to our jobs & apartment and unable to come to the states while we had a visa in process, we planned to spend the summer travelling Europe, which was beginning to open up again after COVID. Europe had a very dubious & unpopular ‘traffic light’ system, advising which countries could be travelled to, based on their case numbers, and one of the few ‘green’ countries was Portugal, so that’s where we decided to go at the beginning of July 2020.

And it was in Porto that we first tried a Vinho Verde wine and instantly fell in love with the light, crisp taste and refreshing spritz – and that’s basically all we drank until we were able to enter the states in October! 

Excited to tell all of our family & friends about ‘green wine’, as it would be the perfect SoCal wine, we soon realised it was not something that was readily available here, and that’s when we had the crazy idea to start importing it to the US!

We then spent the next year & half researching how to start our own wine import & retail business – which seemed like an insurmountable challenge at the time but we just tackled one thing at a time, until May 2022, we decided we were ready to take the plunge!

We quit our jobs, found a guide & translator (Diego, who is now a very good friend and still an integral member of the team), and headed to the Vinho Verde to learn as much as we could about the region & it’s wine, from its producers.

COST:

$10 for members of the Island Wine Club (IWC)

$20 for Guests

$50 Annual Fee to Join the Island Wine Club, Providing Discounts on IWC Events