At Northeast Portland’s Wine Spa, You Can Take a Bath in Wine

I’d envisioned a tub sloshing to the brim with wine. Instead, the attendant at the Wine Spa, which opened last fall on NE Broadway, decants what she tells me is about a bottle and a half of Willamette Valley cabernet franc into the bathwater. The wine, unsellable due to bottling error, makes a scarlet swirl before quickly dispersing. After a brief how-to on the tub’s jets and rainbow array of lights, the attendant departs, and I undress, sinking my body into the steaming pinkish pool.

While some claim Cleopatra bathed in wine, so-called vinotherapy got its commercial start in the 1990s, when a couple in Bordeaux launched a grape-derived skin care line, Caudalie. Later, they opened a luxe spa and hotel where you can soak in a barrel and be gently exfoliated by grapes during a “pulp friction” massage. (Vinotherapy proponents tout the antioxidant benefits of grape extracts, and there’s actually some science to back this up, though less to support submersion.)

The trend spread. Wine soaks at global spa chain Aire Ancient Baths come with cranial massages and cheese platters. Closer to home, “pinotherapy” wraps and scrubs at Newberg’s Allison Inn & Spa are sourced from the resort’s own vineyard.

In Portland, the Wine Spa has lavish treatments: $399 gets you a soak, massage, body scrub, and facial. I’ve opted for the humblest offering, a $99 D-I-Wine package that comes with a Korean face mask containing wine extract, small dishes of grape-seed scrub and Caudalie lotion, and 45 minutes in a private room dotted with battery-operated candles. In Bordeaux, the tubs have winery views. Here, a plastic plant sits opposite a framed photo of a vineyard.

Settling into the tub, I toggle through the colored lights, gagging at the sickly yellow before landing on purple, which is moody without the red’s unsettlingly sanguinous effect. I jack the jets to 10, and as the water roils around me, my complimentary pinot gris sloshing in its compostable plastic cup, I can’t help but think of Homer’s wine-dark sea. I giggle, lean back, and wish I’d brought some cheese.