A Vine Affair began the way the best journeys do, quietly, almost by accident, in a season when the world had paused and the rest of us were learning to slow down with it.
What started as a small ritual, a few weekly tastings, a handful of bottles, a screen full of curious faces from around the world, became something neither expected nor entirely planned. It became a way of gathering people around the things that matter most: a beautiful glass, a generous table, a story worth telling, and the company of people who understand that all three are inseparable.
Six years on, A Vine Affair is no longer a series of tastings. It is a bespoke wine travel atelier, small by design, intentional by nature, built around the slow, considered craft of journeys that change the people who take them.
What we believe travel should feel like
We believe luxury is not a category. It is a feeling — and the feeling we work toward is one of being fully somewhere. Of arriving in a place and slowly, surely, becoming a part of its rhythm rather than a passerby through it.
The journeys we design are built around a single conviction: that the most meaningful trips are not the ones that take you the most places, but the ones that take you the most deeply into one.
Fewer destinations. Longer stays. Mornings that unfold rather than perform. A table you return to. A producer who remembers your name. A region that begins to feel, by the time you leave it, a little like a second home.
This is not a style of travel that suits everyone, and we don't try to make it. But for those it does suit — the travelers who measure a trip by what it leaves behind rather than what it filled — we have built something quietly extraordinary.
MEET GINA LYONS
Owner and Founder, A Vine Affair
A Vine Affair is the work of Gina Lyons — Champagne ambassador, certified Caviar Sommelier, certified travel advisor with Fora Travel, and one of a small international circle of educators inducted into the CRPC, where she gathers twice each year to taste the vins clairs of Cristal and join the harvest at Cristal Rosé.
But the philosophy behind A Vine Affair began long before any of that.
Gina spent more than a decade living abroad in Asia and Europe, developing the appreciation for great food and finer wine that would eventually become her life's work.
Before founding A Vine Affair, she led client experience for a major luxury fashion house — and it is that quiet apprenticeship in the art of caring for discerning people, in the unhurried craft of clienteling, that still shapes the way A Vine Affair welcomes every traveler today.
Hospitality, in her hands, is not a transaction. It is attention.
In 2019, she left the corporate world to pursue wine full-time. She studied. She traveled. She returned to Champagne again and again until the region began to know her. She earned her WSET Level 3, her Caviar Sommelier certification from the Asia Pacific Wine & Spirit Institute, completed the Richard Juhlin Champagne Masterclass, and continues her studies in both WSET and Wine Scholar's Guild.
Beyond Champagne, she has cultivated deep, personal relationships in Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Provence, the kind of relationships that take years to build and cannot be hurried into being. As a certified travel advisor with Fora Travel, Gina extends A Vine Affair's reach into a global network of more than six thousand of the world's finest hotels and properties. The affiliation grants her travelers access to preferred rates, room upgrades, early check-ins, resort credits, and the kind of partner benefits a traveler simply cannot secure on their own. It is the institutional reach behind the intimate hand.
A Vine Affair has been featured in Huff Post, Tampa Bay Business and Wealth, Gulf Shore Life, Lakewood City and Naples City Lifestyle magazines, ABC7 Suncoast View, Booze Press, and The Champagne Club, among others.
Most recently, A Vine Affair was featured in the New York Times Best Seller, Exceptional Experiences: Five Luxury Levers to Elevate Every Aspect of Your Business by multiple best selling author, Neen James.
Closer to home, Gina is the owner of Sarasota Wine Co, alongside her husband, Richard, a boutique fine wine shop in the heart of downtown Sarasota, and A Vine Affair's sister company on Florida's Gulf Coast. It is a quiet, considered space where many of the journeys we design begin: over a glass at the counter, in conversation with a traveler who has just discovered a bottle and, in it, a region they suddenly need to see for themselves. Sarasota Wine Co. is where the same care for hospitality, education, and the slow ceremony of a beautiful bottle meets guests closer to home, and where the philosophy of A Vine Affair lives day to day, in a place you can walk into.
But the credentials, the press, the certifications, the shop, these are the scaffolding. The work itself is something else. It is the relationships Gina has built across the wine regions of the world, the trust she has earned from the producers, the chefs, the château owners, the small hoteliers who open their doors to her guests because they trust her first.
MEET PRISCILLA LAVAUX
Our Voyage Concierge
Born and raised in France, Priscilla Lavaux is our concierge on the ground, the warm voice in three languages, the steady hand on every detail, and the reason our days abroad unfold the way they do.
Before joining A Vine Affair, Priscilla spent twelve years as a legal advisor in France, building a successful career defending the rights of people injured in accidents. In 2021, she chose a different life. She bought a one-way ticket to Thailand, and from that moment forward, the world became her work.
She traveled. She lived among locals rather than alongside them. She built a second profession from the discipline of her first, communicating fluently in French, English, and Spanish, applying the precision of her legal training to the care of our travelers, and bringing a genuine, generous warmth to every guest she meets.
When you travel with A Vine Affair, Priscilla is the person who has already walked the path you are about to walk. She has confirmed the table, met the driver, tasted the wines, and quietly arranged the small surprises you won't know to thank her for until later.
A Wine Travel Atelier, By Design
A Vine Affair is not an agency in the conventional sense. We are a small, deliberate operation that takes on only as many journeys each year as we can personally pour ourselves into.
We do not scale. We do not franchise. We do not delegate the parts that matter. The traveler who writes to us is the traveler we personally welcome, personally care for, and personally see home again.
If something in these pages feels familiar — the rhythm of it, the kind of travel you have been hoping to find — we would love to hear from you.