Taiwan Wine Tour: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chardonnay

Arrive in Taipei, check into the hotel and meet your fellow adventurers. There’s time to freshen up before our welcome briefing, covering the route, the drinks and the reassuring news that nobody needs to perform a flying kick to participate.

Over a Taiwanese welcome dinner, get acquainted through the traditional exchange of names, travel stories and increasingly ambitious food orders. We’ll introduce the adventure ahead while establishing who understands wine, who understands beer and who booked mainly because of the monsters.

Begin our craft-beer exploration at a Taihu taproom, discovering Taiwanese brewing through a selection of contrasting styles. No technical vocabulary required: “I’d happily have that again” gets the job done.

Finish with a night-market wander for anyone with room left. Dumplings, grilled snacks and stinky tofu provide an early test of your curiosity. You may smell the last one before you’ve formally agreed to meet it.

Overnight Taipei.

Start with a guided introduction to Taipei’s older neighbourhoods, exploring streets, shops and temples before lunch. Learn a little about local life while resisting the urge to buy every object that looks charming and costs less than your airport sandwich.

Then comes our first proper Taiwanese wine session: a hosted tasting introducing local producers, growing conditions and bottles that rarely appear on a British restaurant list. Discover why making wine here requires skill, persistence and a somewhat complicated relationship with the weather.

We’ll set a simple blind-tasting challenge, comparing impressions before revealing the bottles. This is your opportunity to confidently detect something that turns out to be the snack beside your glass.

After a break at the hotel, head out for dinner and a craft-beer hop. Round off the evening with an optional cocktail stop showcasing Taiwanese ingredients. By bedtime, you’ll have enough new drinks knowledge to become mildly difficult at your next dinner party.

Overnight Taipei.

Leave Taipei for Houtong, a former mining settlement with industrial history, hillside scenery and cats who appear to have acquired a controlling interest in the visitor experience.

Explore the mining heritage and village lanes, allowing the feline residents to choose whether they wish to participate. The photography challenge is to capture a cat looking interested in your existence. There are no guaranteed winners.

Continue to Jiufen for a leisurely lunch and a wander through its hillside lanes, browsing food stalls and shops. Settle into a teahouse and give tea the attention it deserves. Swirling is unnecessary, and asking about the finish may reveal how thoroughly yesterday’s tasting has affected you.

Return to Taipei with time to rest before dinner. Tonight’s optional entertainment is a private-room karaoke session, where choosing a six-minute song creates a responsibility to know more than the chorus.

Overnight Taipei.

Travel to Yilan and visit Kavalan for a closer look at Taiwan’s contribution to the whisky world. Explore the production story and discover how local conditions influence what ends up in your glass.

A booked tasting gives us time to compare expressions properly, ask questions and appreciate the differences. Someone will inevitably announce that they’ve “always been a whisky person”, despite having discovered this approximately eleven minutes earlier.

If available, an optional blending experience offers the chance to create your own bottle. Give it a suitable name, admire your work and prepare to use the phrase “my blend” far more often than your friends would prefer.

After lunch, enjoy a relaxed local stop and time to explore Yilan before checking into our accommodation. Dinner is followed by an easy evening, with the option of another local drink or an entirely respectable early night. Even aspiring master blenders need sleep.

Overnight Yilan.

Travel back towards Taipei and connect with the high-speed train to Taichung. Pick up a station lunchbox and enjoy an efficient journey during which your biggest logistical challenge should be identifying which snack you intended to save for later.

After checking in, explore Taichung’s creative corners, browsing independent shops and finding time for coffee. The afternoon provides a welcome change of pace before our next brewing investigation.

Tonight, visit a Taihu venue and further local craft-beer stops selected for the departure. Compare styles, swap favourites and discover whether your preferred beer changes when someone else orders something better.

Continue to Fengjia Night Market for a guided food wander. We’ll help you navigate the options, then leave space for personal discoveries. The group’s unofficial tasting panel will probably reach its strongest consensus over something served on a stick.

Overnight Taichung.

Today centres on a proposed hosted visit to Domaine Shu Sheng, introducing another distinctive side of Taiwanese winemaking.

Meet our hosts, explore the producer’s story and taste its wines while discussing how they’re made. This is a proper opportunity to investigate what makes the bottles different, rather than simply standing beside a barrel until someone takes your photograph.

Over lunch, compare your discoveries and attempt to describe your favourite wine without using “lovely” four times. There are no penalties for failure, but the table may offer assistance.

Keep the afternoon flexible for a complementary local stop or a second producer experience if a suitable appointment can be secured. We’ll favour a worthwhile encounter over adding another winery merely to increase the number on the itinerary.

Back in Taichung, enjoy dinner and an optional taproom visit. Anyone wishing to spend the evening quietly may do so without losing their professional tippler status.

Overnight Taichung.

Head into Nantou for a proposed visit to Nantou Distillery, home of OMAR whisky and a broader history of fruit-based drinks.

Explore the visitor areas and enjoy a pre-arranged tasting, with the exact experience shaped around the group arrangements available. Compare this stop with Kavalan and discover whether you’ve developed a preference or simply a longer shopping list.

Pause for lunch before continuing towards Xitou. As the scenery becomes greener and the roads wind into the hills, we’ll exchange city bustle for a slower mountain afternoon.

Check in, stretch your legs and settle down to a group dinner. Tonight’s table challenge: invent a believable tasting note and an entirely ridiculous one, then see whether anyone can distinguish them. “Hints of abandoned garden centre” may prove surprisingly divisive.

Overnight Xitou area.

Explore Xitou’s Monster Village, where Japanese-inspired creatures, themed shops and unusual snacks provide evidence that the trip description wasn’t written during a particularly vivid dream.

Wander beneath the lanterns, inspect the sculptures and browse souvenirs. Our optional photography challenge is to produce the most unnecessarily dramatic monster encounter. Please remember that other visitors may simply be trying to buy bread.

Combine the village with a forest outing, choosing a route appropriate to the group and conditions. Enjoy the trees, cooler air and the opportunity to hear something that isn’t another person saying, “Go on, try mine.”

After lunch and time to explore, return to Taichung. Dinner is followed by an optional craft-beer stop, where everyone can present their most questionable purchase. Buying a small monster is understandable. Naming it and ordering it a chair requires discussion.

Overnight Taichung.

Return to Taipei and enjoy a free afternoon. Revisit a favourite neighbourhood, shop for gifts or find a café and contemplate how many bottles your suitcase can reasonably accommodate.

We’ll regroup for a farewell Taiwanese wine session, revisiting favourites and discussing what surprised us most. A final blind-tasting challenge reveals whether the week has sharpened your palate or simply improved your ability to sound convincing.

Gather for a celebratory dinner and the Tipple Tours awards. Categories may include Best Supporting Dumpling, Most Committed Karaoke Performance and Outstanding Achievement in Buying Something Nobody Needed.

For those who fancy it, finish at a favourite beer or cocktail venue. Raise a glass to the producers, the discoveries and the fact that ten days ago most of us couldn’t have named a Taiwanese wine.

Overnight Taipei.

Enjoy breakfast and make the final checks: passport, phone, bottles securely packed, monster accounted for.

Depart according to your flight arrangements, carrying new favourites, new friendships and a surprisingly detailed opinion about Taiwanese whisky.

Once home, someone will ask whether you enjoyed Thailand.

Show them the photographs. Start with the cat.