Social Supply Wine Weekend at Gate M

For a few hundred years now, the wine world has been telling you that before you're allowed a glass, you need a sommelier, a collared shirt, and the vocabulary to describe something as "wet slate with a whisper of saddle leather." Whose saddle? Doesn't matter. Sit up straight.

Crush has spent eight editions telling all of that to go have a lie-down.

The 8th Crush Wine Festival from Social Supply runs across two weekends, November 6-8 and November 13-15, at Gate M Dream Center on the West Bund, right on the Huangpu River, with more than 110 brands of wine, drinks and assorted lifestyle whatnot. Gate M sits on the old Shanghai Cement Factory site, so you'll be drinking wine where they used to make concrete. Imagine that.

Credit: Ti Gong

A brief, slightly wine-stained history

This thing has gotten around. Back in 2020, the second Crush was a three-day affair in the Piazza at Jing'an Kerry Center with 20-something vendors and snacks from the likes of The Cannery and Bird. In 2021, it set up at La Maison on Jinxian Rd, teamed up with Wine Wave to pair wine with music, then rolled the whole operation over to Heim for a club night that ran until dawn. Wine. Until dawn. My dudes.

2023 was the Xintiandi era, twice over: a spring edition with The Bottle Project and a "Drunk Food" map of street snacks that go with wine, then an autumn edition that was free to get into, let you design your own bottle label, and ran a personality test that matched you to a wine avatar. (I would like to know which avatar you get for "whatever's open, closest to the DJ.")

Then last year it went full Bund at BFC, over two weekends in October and November, the second one a holiday edition with skating involved. Skating. With wine. Bold. Respect.

Credit: Ti Gong

These Last Two Weekends: The Grand Finale

Crush Wine Festival has been a month-long affair, and these last two weekends promise to be the grandest finale for the month of wine, and it lands smack in the middle of the busiest cultural stretch Shanghai has all year.

Credit: Tigong

Not just swirling and spitting

The pitch, and honestly it's a good one, is that wine belongs in the stuff you're already doing: after work, in the park, around the dinner table, at a workshop, at a morning market. No dress code. No exam. So the opening weekend is stacked with things that are not, strictly speaking, wine: Free dance and movement sessions from Hasa House, games from Pigeons, a chess gathering hosted by Notchessmaster, and a vinyl exchange.

Chess and wine is a combination that either turns you into Bobby Fischer or gets your rook taken by a guy in a bucket hat in eleven moves. Only one way to find out. And bring your doubles to the vinyl swap. Nobody needs two copies of Machine Head. (Somebody does. Find that person.)

It's less "formal tasting," more "everybody hanging out by the river with a glass in hand." Which is kind of the whole point.

Credit: Ti Gong

Tasting sets all come with a wine glass, a glass holder (so you can high-five strangers without wearing your Riesling), and 75ml pours you can redeem at any wine vendor on site:

Early Bird Tasting Set: 100 yuan, six tastings

Standard Tasting Set: 80 yuan, three tastings

Group Tasting Set: 300 yuan, up to six glasses and 18 tastings

Six pours for 100 or three pours for 80 yuan. This writer is not a math guy, but the math kind of does itself.