When looking to enjoy an al fresco libation, why isn’t wine your drink of choice?
People often carry beer up to fourteen to cheers when they reach the top, canned cocktails begin to fill coolers on river trips, and hard seltzers seem to be the universal alcoholic beverage of choice for all outdoor activities.
But what about wine?
Courtesy of Revelshine
“Do people outside only drink craft beer and whiskey from a flask, right?” asked Jake Bilbro, fourth-generation winemaker, outdoor enthusiast and founder of Revelshine, your new favorite adventure wine.
While until now, wine and outdoor activities didn’t naturally go together, Bilbro is on a mission to change that feeling.
Revelshine was born out of a frustration “that my two loves, which are the outdoors and wine, really don’t exist together. And I didn’t understand why,” he said.
“It really came down to that I don’t think anyone has ever put wine in the right container to make it fit for outdoor drinking.”
This “good container” is an aluminum bottle. Revelshine wine comes in three varieties – white, red and rosé – all packaged in an extremely lightweight (read: portable) and eco-friendly aluminum bottle with a screw cap that can go anywhere a glass bottle can. traditional wine can not.
Bilbro said it chose aluminum because it is the most recycled, eco-friendly and sustainable packaging material available, making it a no-brainer for a company that primarily relies on sustainable practices. Revelshine is part of 1% for the Planet, giving back and donating money to Jeremy Jones’ Protect Our Winters organization. Jones is also co-founder of Revelshine.
Courtesy of Revelshine
Two additional features of the aluminum bottle that deserve applause are how cool it keeps rosé and whites (especially if you stick it in the snow or river for a few minutes) and the usefulness of the resealable cap when you’re carrying wine, so you can enjoy it one glass at a time without worrying about waste.
And you won’t want to waste a drop once you try it.
The three Revelshine varietals have a deliberately simple name – red, white and rosé – because Bilbro does not blend wine to suit the traditional characteristics of different varietals such as Chardonnay or Pinot Noir, but instead “blends to try to make the wine that is most applicable to the outdoor experience that I think is going to benefit or where that kind of marriage of those two worlds would actually happen.
For example, the outdoor enthusiast said he created the white wine by envisioning being out on the river in the summer to fly-fish, taking a break and sitting in the warm sun with his feet up. in cold water and imagining what he wanted to drink. his hand to taste.
The answer was a light, crisp and refreshing white wine, “like a French wine”, and from there was born Revelshine White.
While it’s about choosing your own adventure when it comes to the style you want to drink, Bilbro said he feels a degree of kinship in associating white with a river adventure, red with a chilly evening. in the mountains and rosé…well maybe rosé is Revelshine’s hard seltzer in that it seems to be enjoyed by everyone and pairs well with any activity.
“Rosé is almost like a category in its own right. I mean, it’s so popular now,” he noted. “It’s almost not even wine, like there’s wine, beer and spirits, and then rosé is its own thing. I see from experience that people drink rosé all the time, no matter what.
Revelshine Rosé definitely drinks like an everyday wine, but also like a bottle of refined rosé. It’s bright and crisp, leaning towards the dry side of rosé, not sweet and sugary.
Although his methods are somewhat non-traditional, Bilbro maintains that he is not trying to redefine wine culture with Revelshine, but rather to expand it.
“Wine culture is a beautiful, beautiful thing,” he said. “I don’t want to reinvent it. But I would like to reinvent it and expand it, to bring that beauty of celebration and the beauty of communal community consumption into a larger realm.”
There are moves to expand Revelshine’s distribution, but until then Bilbro is currently perfectly content to see people connecting with the product and “enjoying wine in the open air”.
“It makes me really happy to see people enjoying these two worlds (wine and the outdoors) together, because I really, honestly and genuinely felt that they should always be together.”