For some time, I have stepped away from writing as a sommelier. Not because wine has become less important to me, but because my work has evolved beyond the traditional boundaries of wine service and hospitality.
Today, I find myself building something far more immersive: environments that exist at the intersection of wine, culinary education, storytelling, social media film production, and cultural experience.
The word “experience” has become one of the most overused terms in hospitality. A twelve-course tasting menu paired with estate wines is certainly an experience. A seated flight in a tasting room is an experience. Yet what we are creating asks a different question entirely:
What happens when a social media film set becomes a wine tasting?
Across our property, we are constructing a series of cinematic landscapes — living film sets designed not merely to host guests, but to transform them. These spaces are built for both physical immersion and digital amplification: environments that can be experienced in person, captured on camera, shared through social media, and rediscovered through technology.
The story does not end when a guest leaves; it continues to circulate through images, conversations, and memory. Best of all, you take home a bottle of the wine you tasted — a signature memory capsule you can open again later, and reorder anytime from the wineries we’re proud to support.
Hospitality is entering a period of profound change.
The traditional tasting room model is no longer sufficient.
Consumers are increasingly selective about where they spend both their time and their money. Formal luxury dining still has its place, but many guests now seek something more participatory, more dynamic, more emotionally resonant. They are looking for connection, discovery, and a sense of belonging.
At the same time, hospitality faces another challenge: the erosion of cultural literacy around food and wine. Great dining rests on a shared social contract — curiosity, respect, generosity, and an understanding that culinary traditions are worthy of attention. As those foundations become less universal, the responsibility falls to us as hosts to create environments that educate as much as they entertain.
That responsibility is sharpened by where we are. The Applegate is a hybrid culture — part wine, part marijuana — and the two have never reconciled into a single identity. That confusion isn’t a quirk; it’s the engine of the exclusion. There is one social order built around grow culture, and the price of admission is participation: if you’re not smoking, you’re not in. That’s a closed door with a very specific key. But step over to the wine side expecting refuge, and you find many of the same hands on the levers, because the line between the two was never clean. People who came up through the grow economy now shape the “wine” experience, and they brought its instincts — not the finesse, not the formal service training, and above all not the discipline of experience design.
So there was never quite a room here that fit. And rather than spend years trying to be let into one, we did the more interesting thing. We built our own.
Our response to the region’s challenges has not been retreat. It has been creation.
One of our newest projects unfolds beneath a cathedral of hundred-foot pines. Guests move through groves of black and white oak before arriving at a series of firelit gathering spaces. Wine is poured not as a product but as a conversation. Winemakers share what they are creating. Guests wander between environments. The evening unfolds more like a cinematic narrative than a tasting.
And then there is Disco Chardonnay.
Part celebration, part provocation, Disco Chardonnay emerged as our answer to every outdated assumption about who belongs in wine culture. It says the people who were left outside will build their own room — and it will be more alive than the one they were kept out of. People need community; when they can’t find it, they make it, in the places they love, on their own terms. It is a disco ball dropped in the wilderness. It is a global dance party in the middle of nowhere, celebrating my favorite, most generous varietal.
Because there is a quiet gift hidden inside being left out. It makes you a maverick — unbranded, beholden to no one’s herd — and the maverick sees everything the insiders are too comfortable to notice: the broken parts, the recycled ideas, the rules that were never written down but kept everyone running the same tired loop. You are handed the clearest view of all, precisely because you were never claimed.
And exclusion does something stranger still: it forces you to innovate. When the common source won’t have you, you are made to draw from somewhere else — outside energies, fresh inputs, the ideas the closed room never thought to reach for. That pressure is the whole engine. It is what pushes you to up-level, to leave the worn thread behind and weave a different one entirely. You don’t get to copy what excluded you. You are forced to build something it could never have produced.
That is the real work — not getting into the old room, but creating the next one. New ground, new ideas, new energy the closed system was structurally incapable of generating. The people who get left out aren’t denied the future. They are pushed into it ahead of everyone else.
Because the best things are not granted — they are created. And it is usually the mavericks, the unclaimed, the ones who had to invent rather than inherit, who build what comes next.