The Days of Wine And Yoga
ON the one hand, there is Angela Gargano, a yoga instructor in Madison, Wis., who doesn’t quite see what the big deal is.
”Yoga can be very serious, sure, but why not have it be really fun?” she said, shrugging off concerns that yoga purists might raise an eyebrow at her latest venture — yoga-and-wine retreats.
On the other hand, there are those like Nancy Elkes, a New York-based yoga trainer and instructor who doesn’t necessarily condemn drinking — she just isn’t so sure it goes with yoga.
”After a yoga class,” she said, ”the last thing you’re thinking about getting is a drink.”
Nonetheless, when Ms. Gargano, who owns Bliss Flow Yoga in Madison, teamed up with David Romanelli, Yahoo’s Mind/Body columnist, last August to stage a weekend-long yoga-and-wine retreat at the Fairmont Mission Inn and Spa in Sonoma, Calif., it was successful enough for Mr. Romanelli to schedule a lineup of seminars across the country for 2007. Tomorrow, Ms. Gargano will take the idea international with a retreat in Barcelona. And next year DeLoach Vineyards, in Sonoma County, will hold its own series of yoga-and-wine retreats.
For Ms. Gargano, the idea was sparked when Mr. Romanelli held one of his popular yoga-and-chocolate seminars at her Madison studio. Ms. Gargano loved pairing yoga with something unconventional and was eager to try a spinoff. When she told Mr. Romanelli about her background in wine, the two decided to team up.
”I was struck by the similarities between the two,” said Ms. Gargano, who was helping her Sicilian father choose wines for the family’s restaurant by the age of 16. ”Which sounds kind of funny, but both yoga and wine can be very intimidating to people. I noticed yoga students coming in and saying, ‘I’m not quite sure where to get started with this.’ ” It was a concern she’d heard before, while working as a wine buyer and sommelier in San Francisco.
But while the notion of combining yoga with another facet of American pop culture is nothing new — Mr. Romanelli, in fact, is currently creating a ”Yoga + ——” concept series with Yahoo.com — serious yogis may draw the line at wine.
”Yogis tend to think the drug is the problem,” Ms. Elkes said. ”But then what about Tylenol? Refined sugar? Caffeine? At some point, one has to say, O.K., if you want a glass of wine, but I don’t think it should necessarily go in conjunction with yoga.”
Especially, she pointed out, if you’re doing something like Kundalini yoga, an intensely meditative form of stretching that many Americans closely associate with the Sikh religion — though, for the record, many Sikhs would argue that their religion and yoga are not as closely intertwined as Westerners believe. Nevertheless, Sikhs who have undergone the Amrit ceremony are instructed against using tobacco, alcohol or any other form of intoxicants.
”Kundalini does things to balance your nervous system,” Ms. Elkes said. ”And then for you to go do something that changes that? It’s going to affect your nervous system after you’ve done all this work to balance yourself. You’ll soon find out that drinking and Kundalini don’t go well together.”
That sentiment is shared by the popular Web site Holistic Online, which states in no uncertain terms: ”Yogis do not touch alcohol, since they consider it to lower the vibrations of their subtle body (astral body). This defeats the purpose of yoga, which is to increase the vibrational level so they can gradually unfold their Higher Self.”
But for Rachel Cimino, a Californian who has practiced with Sikh instructors at Los Angeles’s star-studded yoga empire, Golden Bridge Yoga, the deviation from ritual isn’t a deal-breaker.
”Yoga has become so American, and we have this cafeteria attitude of picking and choosing what we like,” Ms. Cimino said. ”If you were very serious, it would definitely interfere with being a yogi. The best time to do yoga is at twilight, from 3 to 5:30 in the morning, when your energy is most powerful. And if you’re hung over, you’re altering your chemistry.”
But, she added, ”if you are doing yoga a few times a week, you can probably throw down a few glasses of wine. I guarantee that 80 percent of the people that do this also go tear it up.”
For Ravi Hari Kaur Khalsa, a 20-year Kundalini veteran who teaches at the New York Open Center, the key to pairing wine and yoga is moderation. ”I don’t think we can be rigid and across-the-board about these things. I’m hoping that the instructors running these places are responsible, and I trust that they are,” she said.
”Now, will I condone drinking and doing yoga?” she said. ”Absolutely not. I would never want to teach someone drunk; that’s just dangerous. But what is wrong with people sitting out in the vineyard and enjoying themselves? There’s a lot of suffering in the world, and people have a right to live their life. It’s a tough world.”
For her part, Rosemary Garrison, the San Francisco-based instructor who will lead the DeLoach retreats, thinks moderation is the key as well. The retreats will feature vegetarian meals from the 18,000-square-foot organic garden, cooking classes and twice-daily yoga sessions. The wine poured for dinner will come from DeLoach’s own vineyard, in the Russian River Valley.
”You could get five yogis in a room, and every one would have an opinion on everything,” she said. And though she plans to tailor her classes to the skill level of the participants, she intends to focus on her area of training, vinyasa yoga — a fairly vigorous form of yoga that she maintains does not prohibit alcohol.
”I certainly would not want to say that vinyasa yogis are all lushes,” Ms. Garrison said. ”But in the traditions I’ve practiced, alcohol is not off-limits.
”Still,” she added, ”I don’t imagine it’s going to be the kind of thing where people are drinking to get drunk, but more about enjoying the beauty of the wine and the setting, and having a weekend of healthy indulgence. Have a glass of wine, enjoy your night, get a good night’s sleep and come to a really cleansing, vigorous practice the next morning. I mean, that’s what a lot of my students here in San Francisco do anyways — that’s their weekend.”
AT Mr. Romanelli and Ms. Gargano’s retreat last summer, guests didn’t shy away from indulgence when they kicked off the weekend with a five-course dinner, with wine, at a local restaurant.
”Yoga’s something that is spiritual to me — whether I play Bob Marley when I’m doing it or not,” Ms. Gargano said. ”I feel like we’ve lost the spiritual connection to the land that food and wine grows on, and I think anything that can bring us closer to that is good. If someone thinks that’s unorthodox, that’s fine — and there’s room for a lot of different things within the world of yoga.
”We’ve gotten really far away from our food sources,” she said. ”And that was what was nice about the retreat — getting people to really connect to the wine. If you go to a wine bar, that’s one thing. But if you stand there in the vineyard with the people laboring to make this wine, it just really resonates a lot more.”
With that in mind, Mr. Romanelli and Ms. Gargano’s goal was to integrate their two subjects fluidly rather than have them coexist in the same weekend. For instance, her grounding-down class was followed with a vineyard tour, where they talked about how the vine growing in the earth affects the taste of the wine.
”We tried to bring it all together,” Ms. Gargano said, ”so thatpracticing yoga completely brings you into the moment so that you can appreciate one of life’s great pleasures, which is wine.”
But will American yogis buy it? ”Let me put it this way,” Ms. Cimino said, when told about the coming retreats. ”If they do have a wine retreat somewhere in Northern California, sign me up. I want to go.”
SIP AND STRETCH
Striking Poses, Savoring Pinot
WEEKEND yoga-and-wine retreats will be held once a month May through September next year at DeLoach Vineyards (1791 Olivet Road, Santa Rosa, Calif.; 415-289-4544, www.deloachvineyards.com). The vineyards’ guesthouse has three double rooms, and DeLoach can recommend nearby lodging for up to 10 more people. For those staying on site, the cost is $1,000 to $1,100 a person, all-inclusive. If you stay off site, the cost for the retreat is $600 a person and includes everything but lodging and transportation.
Angela Gargano and David Romanelli’s ”Yoga + Wine” workshops are scattered throughout the country next year, and include stops in Santa Monica, Calif.; Chicago; West Palm Beach, Fla.; Scottsdale, Ariz.; and New York. Full listings are at www.yeahdaveyoga.com and at www.blissflowyoga.com. Mr. Romanelli teaches yoga classes at Exhale Spa in Santa Monica and Venice, Calif. (www.exhalespa.com), Ms. Gargano at Bliss Flow Yoga in Madison, Wis.
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