How The Wine And Yoga Movement Started In The U.S. And Spread To France And Italy

Chiara Shannon is one of the trailblazers of the movement involving yoga in the vineyard and mindfulness with wine. She developed these dual passions while finishing her undergraduate degree at UC-Berkeley, but kept them separate for many years. During the day and evenings, she pursued a career as a sommelier and wine sales expert, only practicing yoga, meditation, and mindfulness during her downtime. But an unusual experience at work made her realize that wine and yoga can unite in beneficial ways, leading her to launch her company, Mindful Wine, in 2016.

“I was working in wine sales at K&L Wine Merchants in San Francisco and we were doing a blind tasting,” reports Shannon. “It was my first time, but I won the blind tasting because I used mindfulness techniques to calm my mind, activate my senses and correctly identify the wine.”

It was this experience that led to the “aha” moment of combining mindfulness, wine, and yoga into a business. So Shannon, both a certified sommelier and yoga instructor by this time, started working with various wineries throughout California to host yoga and wine workshops. Today her business is booming, even though she was forced to go online during Covid.

“The pandemic put a stop to in-person events at wineries for a while,” Shannon explains, “but we were able to offer online mindfulness and wine tastings with corporations, and eventually moved yoga classes from inside the winery to outside in the vineyards. Mindfulness can help people to get involved with wine in a healthy way.”

How a Yoga, Mindfulness and Wine Experience Works

Though the idea of drinking wine while performing difficult yoga moves sounds alarming at first, that is not the way professional experiences are organized. “We don’t drink wine before the yoga class,” explains Shannon. “That always comes afterwards.”

In general, most experiences begin with a welcoming introduction to the process, followed by a yoga class in the vineyard or winery. During the class participants learn how yoga is not only a form of exercise, but an ancient technique for calming the nervous system, activating the senses, and cultivating present-moment awareness. After the class, this focus on mindfulness is translated to a wine-tasting.

Shannon, who has trademarked her ‘Mindful Wine Tasting’ technique, explains that it is a sequence of 4 steps: visual appreciation of the wine, smelling, tasting, and discernment. “The goal,” explains Shannon, “is to encourage people to pause, relax, and see what else they can notice when doing this. Wine is a great vessel for this experience, and the mindfulness concepts can be transferred to other parts of their lives to stop and pay attention, with food, with people,… to be in the moment.”

The wine-tasting experience usually includes tastes of several different wines, and then participants are encouraged to spend more time enjoying the winery, and perhaps, meeting the winemaker. Benefits to the winery include the opportunity to provide unique experiences for visitors and increase wine sales.

Yoga and Wine Experiences Move to Europe

A search of the internet will quickly yield a list of wine and yoga retreats that have popped up in France, Italy and other parts of Europe recently. “I believe the concept of yoga and wine started in California and then made its way to France,” reports Laurence Cogan-Marie, an Associate Professor of Wine Tourism with the Burgundy School of Wine & Spirits Business in Dijon, France.

An avid fan of yoga herself, Cogan-Marie frequently seeks out yoga retreats throughout France, and has discovered that combining yoga and mindfulness with wine is becoming a popular trend. “People used to think you can’t do yoga and drink wine, but that is changing here in France now.”

She provides a list of several wineries and health retreats in Champagne, Bordeaux, the Dordogne, Paris, and the South of France that are offering yoga and wine experiences, and explains the process. “Usually you do yoga in the vineyard or winery first, then meditate and relax to awaken the senses, before closing your eyes and tasting the wine mindfully. The results are that you appreciate the wine more – how it smells, tastes, and the feel of it on your palate. You slow down and enjoy life.”

Cogan-Marie explains that in France, there is a belief that moderate consumption of wine each day is good for your health. “It is part of our French culture,” she explains. “That is why most of our health resorts and spas include wine with dinner.”

“Well-being and looking after your health are more important now since Covid,” she continues. “People are feeling drained and stressed. Yoga and mindfulness helps with healing, and adding wine to the experience makes it even more relaxing.”

As a wine tourism expert, Cogan-Marie states that there is another tourism trend in Europe that is making yoga and wine experiences more popular. “We have something called ‘proximity tourism,’ where you try to stay local to use less gas to help reduce global warming and your carbon footprint,” she explains. “Yoga and wine classes, or yoga and wine retreats are part of this trend.”

This could be part of the reason why Chiara Lungarotti, CEO of Lungarotti Winery, reports that the new yoga and wine experience they started offering at their winery in Umbria, Italy has become so popular. “We hold the yoga classes on a beautiful grassy hillside overlooking our vineyards with a wonderful view of the Italian countryside,” says Lungarotti. Afterwards visitors enjoy a mindful wine-tasting, and can also enjoy a tour of the winery and a relaxing lunch. Other wineries and resorts also offer wine and yoga experience in other parts of Italy, such as Tuscany, Sicily, and Verona.

Beyond Yoga and Wine to Qi Gong and Wine

At Paul Blanck & Fils Winery in the Alsace wine region of France, the winemaker, Philippe Blanck, has decided to forgo yoga and instead invites visitors to join him practicing Qi Gong in the vineyards. Qi Gong is an ancient Chinese system of wellness that includes slow body movements, breathing and meditation for health.

“I learned Qi Gong a number of years ago,” states Blanck, “and I really enjoy its health benefits. So I decided to offer it in the vineyards as a special experience for our visitors, followed by a tasting of our grand cru Alsatian wines.”

The winetasting portion includes two to three tastes in the vineyard, followed by another ten tastes in the winery tasting room. All of the wines are tasted using Blanck’s ‘Geosensorial Tasting’ technique which incorporates the mindfulness of Qi Gong and encourages visitors to interpret the wine not only on sight, smell, and taste, but on a sense of the vineyard’s location on the earth and what that brings to the experience. This new style of mindful tasting is so unique that it is now being researched by the Wine Scholar’s Guild.