When I was invited to step outside Toronto restaurant The Hamptons (53 Clinton St., Toronto) to sabre the top of a bottle of bubbly, I was trepidatious. Sabring is using a heavy sword to take the top off a bottle of champagne. I am a clumsy person, always cutting my fingers. I am anxious about performing feats of dexterity in front of onlookers. Like many gay men, I have often been the last person chosen for sports teams. I had never held a sharp sword before, never mind used one to chop through glass. But I figured that if I volunteered quickly, before too many people went outside to watch, I could get it over with, and without too much embarrassment. I signed the waiver with a sigh.
Yet it was a rush, letting the heavy purpose-made champagne sabre slide down the bottle, knocking the top a few feet into the yard, then watching as the sparkling wine foamed heedlessly on the grass. My slice was clean and near the top of the bottleneck, which is exactly how you want to do it. Nobody laughed. The straight guy who followed me made a jagged cut much farther down the neck. He tried again with similar results. I felt very butch, like I had scored a touchdown in the bottom of the ninth inning of the Stanley Cup finals. My face was already flush from tasting wine during the early part of the evening, but if you looked closely, you could see that I was blushing.
The event was for a new Canadian wine and spirits club called Barrel Hunter Club. The brainchild of David Racicot, a Montreal native who worked for more than 20 years as a sales and marketing executive in the tech industry, the club was just launched in 2024. Racicot, a big personality who has a taste for life’s finer things, wanted to bring fellow epicureans together to explore wine and spirits in a way that wasn’t stuffy or nerdy. And he wanted the experience to be inclusive, especially for women and LGBTQ2S+ oenophiles, who can often feel uncomfortable when straight guys start mansplaining wine at each other. There are three levels of monthly membership, with different price points offering different benefits.
Last December, at The Hamptons event where I got to wield the sabre, Racicot wowed media types with delicious food and drink. Attendees also got to meet the club’s secret weapon, John Szabo, the first Canadian to earn the title of Master Sommelier. Szabo curates the club’s collection, hosts its most elite events, and knows how to talk about wine in a way that’s appealing to neophytes and connoisseurs alike.
As a travel writer, it’s awkward for me to cover VIP events. Most of the experiences I try out, and most of what I write about, needs to be replicable by readers; travellers should be able to follow in my footsteps. More specifically, I’m an LGBTQ2S+ travel writer, and I also wanted to see how the Barrel Hunter experience would go over with a group of queer people. So I signed up for one of Barrel Hunter Club’s masterclass events, where a sommelier hosts an evening of wine tasting. It was a queer-majority celebration for a lesbian friend’s birthday.
Let me give away the ending now: Attendees found ourselves dancing around the room to ABBA classics. Even the two straight guys.
Many clubs are built around an HQ, wine clubs around a cellar. But Barrel Hunter Club, though based in Toronto, has chapters across the country, and many of the experiences they offer come straight to you. One of the main perks of membership is that members can order products online that aren’t available through their local government-run alcohol agency and have them delivered right to their home.
For those who regard wine as the perfect method of armchair travel, a collective tasting experience can be the most rewarding aspect of oenophilia. It’s not just about sipping but also learning the history and geography that went into that sip and chatting about that. Barrel Hunter Club releases themed seasonal collections—the latest one was Gaudí, featuring wines from Spain, particularly the area around Barcelona—which can add to the feeling of travelling through your wine glass.
Because there is no brick-and-mortar clubhouse, members who sign up for a masterclass have the party come to them. (Non-members can also host a Barrel Hunter masterclass, but for a higher price.) The sommelier, the drinks, and the glasses and accessories show up where you are, whether it’s a home, a condo party room, a yacht or a cottage. That means you need to have access to a space big enough for the gathering, but it also means you get to stay on your home turf. Our birthday party masterclass was hosted by a friend who owns a sleek highrise condo in Toronto’s Gay Village, so things were already pretty gay before the group of 14 guests—half straight, half gay and lesbian—showed up.
Our sommelier for the night, one of several available from Barrel Hunter, was Alida Di Placido, who spent a decade in the corporate world before moving to Bologna, Italy, getting her MBA in food and wine management, and committing fully to the world of wine. She led our masterclass in a format that was more conversation than presentation, following our interests and giving everyone the time they needed to ask questions and finish their drinks at each round of the five-drink tasting. When one of the gay male guests made occasional racy comments about gay hookup culture, Di Placido didn’t flinch and even laughed at some of them.
I wondered how the two middle-aged straight guys who were on the guest list would fit in. Sophisticated and open minded—the kind of straight guys you could take to a drag show—they both knew quite a bit about wine. But they did not monopolize the conversation. Di Placido did not give them special attention, though she did pay special attention to the guest of honour, who had some of the best questions and comments of the evening, early on naming the yeasty taste in a glass of non-alcoholic German sparkling rosé.
We worked our way around a couple of regions of Spain and a corner of Tuscany before ending the tasting with a potent armagnac from southwest France.
While Di Placido finished her session and was packing up, the music got louder and more raucous. And more international, as dance hits from Turkey, India and Colombia were added to the playlist.
By the time a well-known quartet from Sweden chimed in with their “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight),” any pretences left had melted. A conga line formed with the lesbian couple from the west end never missing a single loop around the living room. The two straight guys, who had resisted many other dance hits, joined in near the end. The evening felt complete.
Had we learned a lot about wine? Indeed. Did we feel elevated? For a while. But when you’re serious party animals, that sort of elevation can last for only so long.
You can bring the wine club to the Gay Village, but you can’t take the, uh village out of the gay…no…. You can’t take the gay out of the village…um, no…. How about this: You can bring the wine club to the Gay Village, but that just makes the wine club gay.
The described events were complimentary media events provided by Barrel Hunter Club. The club did not direct or review coverage. The views expressed are the writer’s own.
