A yogini and a wineman walk into a bar…..
Well, it wasn’t really a bar- technically, it’s a wine accessories superstore, but you get my drift.
At Pinot Boutique on September 27th, we had a chance to expand our spirituality with a lesson on Eastern philosophy while sipping perfectly paired vino in a guided wine tasting. We’ve done some pretty interesting activities after having a few cocktails, but yoga hasn’t been one of them… until now. This crazy combination sounded a bit odd to us at first, but, once we were settled in the class, we couldn’t believe how seamlessly wine and yoga melded together.
Walking into the dimly lit room buzzing with rhythmic music, we were greeted at once by Victoria’s effortless smile, and Dan welcomed us to begin the lesson with a healthy pour of a Cabernet-Franc from local vineyard, Pinnacle Ridge.
A similarly obvious pairing exists between the two founders of these killer companies. Victoria Purcell of Blissful Yoga in Mullica Hill, NJ and Dan Soskin, owner and founder of Pinot Boutique have an incredibly easy rapport, and their lighthearted interaction and breezy humor added a certain intangible dynamic to the lesson. While Dan “The Wineman” didn’t know much about chakras before meeting Victoria, she was naive to the complexities of wine, and they quickly became each other’s mentor.
To begin the class each of the seven major chakras, the energy centers of your body, were explained and paired with a complimentary vintage. According to Victoria, chakras are centers of life force energy (qi or chi) that correspond to vital points in the physical body. As the chakras spin, they vibrate with energy—balancing our spiritual, mental, emotional and physical health. Sometimes the Chakras become unbalanced, and this disproportion manifests as symptoms in the mind, body, or spirit. The goal of chakra balancing is to realign the 7 major chakra centers – Root, Sacral, Solar Plexus, Heart, Throat, Brow and Crown – in order to return the natural flow of energy to the individual.
When it came to the wine lesson, we were impressed with the vast amount of knowledge instilled upon us by Dan. First, there’s the proper glass swirling technique to add oxygen to the liquid, a process which makes a wine more well balanced and more approachable. To properly enjoy a tasting, Dan recommends a systematic comparison utilizing the five S’s: seeing, swirling, smelling, sipping and savoring. Dan reminded us that no one needs a lesson in drinking wine. “You know how to drink when you’re born, and you get much better at it when you’re in college,” says Dan, always quick to throw in a little goodnatured humor to keep the mood light.
As the class came to an end, we wrapped up with an endearing sendoff from Dan. “You can smell wine, taste wine, touch wine and feel wine. But how can you hear wine?” The perplexed crowd thought a minute and then looked to Dan for an answer. He saluted, “Cheers!” We all clinked glasses and headed back to our day a tad more buzzed and more enlightened than when we came in.
To that end, this class was an absolute success. Stay tuned for more collaborations at Pinot Boutique. For updates on wines and chakras, follow Pinot Boutique on Facebook and Twitter and Blissful Yoga on Facebook and Instagram.
*Pinot Boutique is a client of Philly PR Girl LLC*
