If you’ve had the thought “I could drink an actual bucket of wine” in the last few months, well, now you can. There’s a new delivery option in town and it brings a party to you, complete with multiple bottles of wine, party favors and a three-hour DJ lineup to set the mood. Do you need to drink the wine out of the bucket? Not at all. Can you? Absolutely, welcome to the new world order.
The bucket bundle comes by way of the vino-loving brains behind Pinkies Up, a natural-wine–focused event series that’s popped up at the likes of Kensho, Lolo and Doubting Thomas and blends party vibes with wine tasting and education. This time founders Emily Koh and Amanda Smith teamed up with Echo Park’s El Prado to deliver a little Pinkies Up magic to your door, complete with their events’ buckets (frequently used for sitting, but totally available to use as a drinking vessel). It’s not exactly like a typical Pinkies Up event—which usually sports DJs, plenty of wine and a dance floor—but it brings the party to your own backyard.
“The whole part of our business is people being together, and now we’re like, ‘Shit, now what?’” says Smith. “[The virus] took away all of that.”
After an early-March pop-up, she and Koh were in the planning phases of their next Pinkies Up event; like most businesses, they had to pivot, and began brainstorming how to keep their series going during coronavirus. The answer? Bring the party to the people. But the buckets don’t only provide a party—they also offer a way to support L.A.’s bars.
“We don’t want to oversaturate a market that’s already super oversaturated,” Smith says. “Bars are doing to-go [drinks] and we love those people. Those bars are like our family and we don’t want to take away from their business, especially at a time like right now—we want to support, rather than add another thing. So we wondered how we can we partner with bars that have supported us when we were the really, really little guy.”
Koh and Smith plan to offer their wine buckets monthly, at least for the next few months, and hope to team up with a different bar each iteration. This first round, your wines will come curated by Tali MacAdams, the wine director of El Prado—which is the bar you’ll be ordering through—and can include either two bottles of wine for $55, or four for $110. Each bucket includes your wine selection, festive decorations, candies, merch and party favors, plus an access code to a three-hour DJ lineup in the spirit of an IRL Pinkies Up party.
The cost includes delivery throughout L.A. County, with a flexible radius from the Eastside to the Westside to Long Beach and beyond. Simply order online by Saturday, May 30, and it all gets delivered to you on Monday, June 1. What you do with the bucket is up to you (but again, we’re thinking drinking vessel).
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Order this run of Pinkies Up now through May 30 through El Prado for $55 or $110, bucket depending; deliveries arrive June 1. Follow Pinkies Up on Instagram for details on their next round of party packs.
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