It started with a photograph.
Rio de Janeiro — the Pão de Açúcar, or maybe the Christ the Redeemer with Rio’s beaches stretching behind. I’m not entirely sure anymore. But I remember exactly what it made me feel.
It never let me go.
But a photograph alone doesn’t change a life. People do.
In Great Britain, in 1987 and ’88, I found myself surrounded by friends from Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil — and so many more. Their warmth, their stories, their way of living pulled me in long before I ever boarded a plane.
By the time I finally arrived in South America in 1989, I already felt at home.
Three years in Brazil. Two in Costa Rica. About six months in Mexico. Months in Colombia, Ecuador and Chile. Three years in Peru. Bolivia — a place I kept returning to. Eleven, maybe twelve years in Argentina. Almost a year in Great Britain. Over six months in Spain — and counting. And along the way — francophone Canada and parts of the United States.
But numbers don’t tell the full story.
Once, I decided to travel from Ushuaia to Mexico — without taking a single flight. The bottom of the world to the top of a continent, overland. Every border, every landscape, every encounter — lived from the inside. And every local wine, of course.
The landscapes, the cultures, the people — they didn’t just shape my vision. They became part of who I am.
The idea first crossed my mind in Cafayate. I remember sitting on a low stone wall in the village square, lost in thought, when the question simply arrived: why not wine tours? I didn’t act on it then — but the seed was planted.
Years later, I celebrated my 50th birthday apéro almost 12,000 feet up in the mountains of Jujuy, an ancient mine turned bodega behind me. Ahead of me: nothing but space, silence, and peace — the Mesón de Yacoraite standing in the distance, an Andean condor circling overhead as if joining the celebration. Above a vineyard already standing at nearly 11,000 feet — Argentina’s highest — the thought was still there, quietly taking shape.
I never remember my dreams. But one night, living in Brazil, years after that first thought in Cafayate, a dream spoke to me.
In French, English, Portuguese — I’m not even sure. It doesn’t matter.
“Wine Tours in Style, Che — that’s for you.”
I woke up. And the path was clear. What had started as a single thought on a wall in Cafayate had finally found its name — and its purpose.
Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me. I grew up in Valais — where vines cling to mountain slopes and wine is simply part of life.
Wine was never just a product for me. It came first from Valais, Switzerland, where I grew up — where wine is woven into every apéro, every gathering, every moment of connection long before it becomes anything else.
My first true immersion came even before my first harvest, before my first real hands-on experience in a cellar. While working at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne, I was entrusted with reorganizing the hotel’s wine cellar, worth several hundred thousand Swiss francs. There, among the bottles, I discovered what wine could be at its highest expression: the classified growths of Bordeaux standing beside the bold reds of Ribera del Duero and Rioja, the fortified richness of Portugal’s great Ports, the golden sweetness of Hungary’s Tokaji Aszú, the wines of Carmel carrying the story of Israel, the finest vintages of Italy — and our own Swiss terroir, holding its ground proudly among them all. It was an education no classroom could offer.
My education at the École Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) didn’t introduce me to wine — it gave language and rigor to something that had always been instinct, and depth to something that had already begun to reveal itself, bottle by bottle, in that cellar. Wine was never a price tag. It was, and still is, a way of life. A way of experiencing the world.
Because every region I propose, I have visited personally. Every wine, I have tasted. Every encounter, I have lived.
That is what Wine Tours in Style means.
From the Andes to the Alps. From Mendoza to the Valais. From Ribera del Duero to the Douro Valley.
One journey at a time. Always in Style.