Sébastien Rake Bringing Rare Wines to Portland with DownCellar

Because of his career in the wine world, Sébastien Rake's friends were always asking him if he'd sipped anything truly singular lately. Of course the answer was always yes — as the sales manager at J. Christopher Wines he always gets to taste great things. But those tastes always seemed to come from very hard-to-find bottles — the kind of rare wines that his friends would never be able to track down locally because markets here don't carry them.

With DownCellar, his new very, very curated wine shop and tasting room in NW Portland, Rake is hoping to solve the accessibility problem. In his new digs, you should expect about eight tasting room seats, tasting parties for newly imported bottles, classes on how to pair certain wines (think reds and chocolate) and a small but very particular list of Old World wines imported mainly from Spain and France.

Rake is aiming to open DownCellar at 925 NW 19th Avenue on April 10.