Brian’s Backstory
Brian McClintic has spent the better part of 15 years in the wine industry, spanning restaurant destinations such as the Little Nell in Aspen before branching out on his own. Much of his wine journey is chronicled in the documentaries SOMM , SOMM: Into the Bottle, and SOMM3. After he co-founded a wine bar in Santa Barbara, Brian left the restaurant floor to launch Viticole in 2016, an online wine subscription, focused on ancestral farming and cellar practices. Viticole custom curates special bottlings, directly with growers from around the world, who continue to redefine what a nature-led vision of the wine industry looks like, on land and in the glass.
A Note from Brian
“I know what I want this business to be. But I have a hard time saying it out loud without laughing. I want Viticole to be an art installation for what the world might look like. The chuckles come when I acknowledge that the art in question is a 750ml vessel of alcohol, and I am not the artist.
Like all wine retailers we trade on the craft of others. So if we are to be the gallery owner in this equation, at the very least, I have the opportunity to hang portraits on the wall that inspire me. It’s where I started in 2016. With a burning desire to be moved by something. To be altered by it. And so the somewhat Tony Robbins-ish premise arose that I am not here to develop a business, but rather it is here to develop me. What started as just a simple desire to travel and see the world, something I had not done as an adult, has become an evolving narrative that has rewritten the chapters of my life, time and time again.
L.A. boy moves to cabin in the woods. And here I abide, negotiating poison oak and field mice for roommates, remaining just thawed enough throughout the winter months—thanks to a small Irish woodstove—in an effort, albeit futilely sometimes, to declutter my existence and rebel against the domestication that defines so many of us.
How a wine business has led me here I genuinely have no answer for. There is some insight, however, in the collaborative projects we enmesh ourselves in. The gallery pieces. They are, each one, a little piece of me, despite being painted by another’s brush. And they speak to a forgotten world, a feral place of vast wisdom and magic, that knows every hair on our head. As Thoreau put it, ‘We need the tonic of the wilderness.’ Not that he meant this literally but liquid reminders are nice too…”
- Brian McClintic, Owner/Founder