A lifelong French red loyalist walks into a Big Wine Freaks party expecting to be polite about "glou glou" wine. Instead I find a room with a DJ, no stuffiness whatsoever, and a wine list quietly more serious than the atmosphere would have you believe.
I am, by my own private and somewhat embarrassing classification, a Big Wine Freak, or as big a one as a WSET Level 2 hobbyist is permitted to be without a professional excuse. So when the invitation arrived for a "glou glou" party at Big Wine Freaks, the biased wine nerd in me did what biased wine nerds do: braced. Would the natural wines be too funky. Would I spend the evening being diplomatic about something I had already decided, on paper, in advance, not to like.
"Remember gentlemen, it's not just France we are fighting for, it's Champagne," said Winston Churchill, a man who never once, to my knowledge, attended a party in Bukit Pasoh, though I suspect he would have had opinions.
If you did not already know this about me, and I suspect, from the stories and the posts, that you do, I have spent actual years being That Person about French reds. The same three producers, on a loop. A curled lip for anything wearing a cartoon on its label. A reflexive translation of the words "glou glou," in my head, as wine you drink for the fun of it rather than the seriousness of it. Chuggable. A wine with low expectations of you and of itself.
So it was a small defeat, walking into a Big Wine Freaks party and finding the room genuinely difficult to dislike. The interiors do not apologize for themselves, chic in the deliberately unstable way of a room that could, at any moment, decide to be something else entirely. A long table anchors the center, flanked by other long tables and high, comfortable seats, with a scattering of lower ones for anyone less interested in a view. I wanted the high seats. From up there you can watch the open kitchen work itself into a controlled frenzy, and you can watch the room swirl its glasses at it, half in appreciation, half out of habit. It felt, more than anything, like a friend's loft that had been given permission to be an art gallery for the night.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about glou glou as an actual school of winemaking, rather than a mood: it is not the absence of seriousness. It is a different variety of it. A winemaker can decide that structure, tension, and terroir belong in a glass that also happens to go down with embarrassing speed, and both things can be true at once. Big Wine Freaks is not a wine club, and has no apparent wish to be mistaken for one. It is a party thrown by people who know exactly what is in the bottle.
The Room Is Built for a Good Night, Not a Seminar
You do not enter Big Wine Freaks so much as get absorbed into it. Red velvet, black lacquer, a tiered amphitheatre of seating angled toward a central bar as though the room itself is expecting a performance, and lighting calibrated to make everyone look ten percent more interesting than they are on a normal Tuesday. It commits to a kind of maximalism that Singapore dining rooms rarely attempt, somewhere between old European excess and a set you would be gently mocked for building today, if you tried.
What actually sets the tone, though, is the music. There is a DJ. There is a crowd comfortable being loud. Nobody in that room appeared to be studying the natural wine list in silence, the way one is meant to, apparently, studying being the correct verb for wine according to every course I have ever paid money to sit through. It is the precise opposite of the wine bore's register, less "let me tell you about terroir" and more "here is a glass, go and have an opinion about it, ask a question only if you actually want the answer." That looseness did real work on me. It is the reason someone as stubborn as I am stayed long enough to taste what was actually in the glass, instead of performing skepticism at it from a safe distance.
What Was Actually in the Glass
The list behind all this belongs to Goh Kher Meng, Big Wine Freaks' Head Sommelier and one of only thirty Advanced Sommeliers certified by the Court of Master Sommeliers in Singapore, which perhaps explains why a menu stamped "dangerously drinkable" carries this much thought underneath the slogan. The cellar leans toward rising producers out of Champagne and Burgundy, alongside natural bottlings from Jura, Beaujolais, the Loire, Japan, Spain, Austria, and Italy, all drawn from small, organic, and sustainable micro-farms rather than the anonymous négociants who supply most lists of this size. It is a program built by a man who wants you to leave remembering the person who made your wine, not merely the number beside it on the list. It simply happens to be delivered at party volume rather than library volume.
The pours that evening did serious work while appearing entirely uninterested in being taken seriously. The Dandelion Pet Nat NV opened proceedings, sparkling and unassuming to look at, bone dry underneath the fizz in a way that caught me off guard on the first sip and had me nodding by the second. Pet Nat has a poor reputation among people who have only encountered the cloudy, faintly off bottle. This was not that bottle. This was controlled chaos, the useful kind.
The Jura Glanon Savagnin '23 was the wine I kept returning to across the table, and I will return to it properly below. Savagnin from Jura carries an oxidative, almost nutty tension that reads more cerebral than any "glou glou" label would suggest, and the fact that it remained, despite that tension, stupidly easy to drink, is more or less the entire argument Big Wine Freaks is making with this menu. They filed it under Innovators. Fair enough. It did not behave like anything I expected to meet at a party.
Then the Friuli Radikon Pop Rosso '25 arrived chilled, which a year ago I would have called, without irony, a crime, and which I have since been unable to stop doing at home. Radikon is a serious, much-admired Friuli producer working in skin contact and natural methods well before either phrase had any currency, and the Pop Rosso is the house having fun without losing its nerve. A chilled red that still behaves as though it has somewhere important to be. The Bastian Wolber Hautes-Côtes de Beaune '24 closed the evening and sat closest to my old comfort zone, proper Burgundian pedigree, served nonetheless with the same low-ceremony chill as everything before it. It did not feel like a concession to my former habits. It felt like the same philosophy, wearing a slightly more familiar coat.
"It isn't the absence of seriousness. It's a different kind of it."
None of it was precious. Nobody swirled for the benefit of an audience. People were, by every appearance, simply drinking well-made wine quickly, at volume, to good music, because it had been made with exactly that use in mind.
The Three Whites I Kept Circling Back To
In the interest of full disclosure, I completed my WSET Level 2 partly so I could stop nodding vaguely whenever a sommelier spoke and start, occasionally, arguing back. This was the evening that education finally earned its tuition. For a red loyalist braced to be polite about "juice wine," it was the whites, not the reds, that did the real damage, and three of them in particular deserve more than a passing "yum."
The one still living somewhere in the back of my head is the Domaine Saint-Cyr Les Gallong, a Beaujolais Blanc with no business being this interesting. It is one hundred percent Chardonnay off clay-limestone soil, direct-pressed and fermented on native yeasts, then left for a genuinely long eighteen months between old thirty-hectolitre foudre and concrete tank before being bottled unfiltered, with no added sulphites. The process shows. Pale gold in the glass, a nose that opens on baked apple and crushed hazelnut before something more savory and faintly saline creeps in beneath it. On the palate it is textural rather than fruit-forward, a rounded, slightly waxy mid-palate from the lees contact, cut by a bright, almost saline thread of acidity that never lets it go soft. A long finish, a little smoke at the tail. This is the glass I was holding when I stopped being a snob about the whole category, and I had already ordered a case by the following morning.
Second was the Glanon Savagnin '23, a natural bottling from the Jura made with grapes sourced through the Pupillin cooperative. Savagnin is the grape responsible for Jura's entire reputation for going sideways in interesting directions, and this one leans into that oxidative, sherry-adjacent register without tipping fully into Vin Jaune territory. A nose of green walnut, bruised apple, and something faintly saline, the way a rock pool smells after the tide has gone out. On the palate it is tense and linear rather than broad, with a nutty, curry-leaf spice that lingers stubbornly at the finish. It is the sort of wine that makes a WSET brain light up, every textbook descriptor for oxidative Jura white present and accounted for, and yet it never once tastes like a textbook.
The third, and the most theatrical of the evening, was Radikon's Ribolla, Stanko Radikon's skin-contact Ribolla Gialla, poured from the house's one-litre format and already several years out from its 2017 harvest, which is entirely in keeping with a producer who releases nothing before it is ready. Ribolla Gialla is Collio's own indigenous grape, and Radikon has been practicing extended skin-contact maceration on it since the early nineties, long before "orange wine" was a phrase anyone outside Friuli had reason to use. This one poured a deep amber-copper, no shade a person could honestly call white, with a nose of dried apricot, black tea, orange peel, and something faintly resinous underneath. On the palate the tannin is real and slightly chewy, structured more like a light red than any white has a right to be, the fruit pushed behind tea-leaf bitterness toward a long, drying finish. It is not an easy wine. It is, however, an extremely serious one, and it stands as the clearest possible proof that "glou glou" and "complex" were never actually opposites. They had simply been marketed as though they were.
Ranked honestly, in the order I would reorder them tomorrow: the Gallong Beaujolais Blanc first, without much of a contest; the Glanon Savagnin close behind, for pure Jura correctness; the Radikon Ribolla last, not for any failing of its own but because it demands a kind of attention a party rarely allows a person to give it, though I would happily sit with it properly on a quieter night.
The Food Specials Were Not Playing Backup
Big Wine Freaks does not treat its kitchen as an afterthought to its cellar, and the specials menu that evening made the case plainly. The Octopus Arancini with spicy aioli, eighteen dollars, arrived first, crisp-shelled and molten within, the kind of bite that vanishes in two seconds and gets reordered out of pure denial that it is finished.
The Seabream Carpaccio with passion fruit and kombu, twenty-seven dollars, did the most interesting work of the table, thin and clean fish leaning into the passion fruit's sharpness while the kombu pulled it back toward something savory and mineral, plainly built to sit beside the Savagnin rather than compete with it. Cold Cuts and Pickles, twenty-two dollars, performed the exact function a cold cuts board should perform at a party of this kind, giving the palate somewhere to rest between pours without asking very much of it in return.
The Bouchot Mussel Stew, made to share, thirty-nine dollars, was the evening's actual centerpiece. Bouchot mussels, the small, rope-cultivated French variety, are sweeter and more tender than what one usually finds here, and the stew leaned into that with a broth plainly built to be mopped up rather than spooned politely. It is the dish that forces an entire table to lean in at the same moment, which, at a party organized around communal drinking, is more or less the whole assignment. The Charred Swordfish with orange and fennel, forty-eight dollars, closed the specials on a cleaner, brighter register, good char, citrus doing honest work, fennel holding the whole plate back from heaviness at exactly the point in the evening when the wine had already gone several rounds deep.
None of it read as an afterthought to the wine program, and none of it attempted to outshine it either. It felt built alongside the pours, dish by dish, which is rarer than it ought to be at a party of this size.
The Actual Verdict
I arrived prepared to be the wine snob in the room, quietly rehearsing polite things to say about wine I had already decided, unfairly, was lightweight. Big Wine Freaks did not argue with me, and made no attempt to school me out of the position. It simply turned the music up, poured properly, and let the Savagnin, the Ribolla, and that ridiculous Pet Nat do the actual convincing. It turns out glou glou was never a lesser category than whatever I usually drink. It was only ever a different register of the same seriousness, and the room never needed to resemble a wine club to prove it. It needed only to be honest about what was in the glass, which might, on reflection, be the more advanced move of the two.
I am not saying I have abandoned my French reds. I am saying I ordered a case of the Gallong Blanc the next morning, still faintly buzzing, with no regrets whatsoever.
NEED TO KNOW
What it is A wine and champagne restobar in Bukit Pasoh, DJ, low lighting, tiered amphitheatre seating, and a wine list run by an Advanced Sommelier that is more serious than its own party atmosphere lets on.
Wines on the party menu Dandelion Pet Nat NV, Burgundy; Glanon Savagnin '23, Jura; Radikon Pop Rosso '25, Friuli; Bastian Wolber Hautes-Côtes de Beaune '24, Burgundy, and others not listed here.
Standout whites Domaine Saint-Cyr Les Gallong Beaujolais Blanc; Glanon Savagnin '23, Jura; Radikon Ribolla (1L, '17), Friuli.
Food specials Octopus Arancini, $18; Seabream Carpaccio with Passion Fruit and Kombu, $27; Cold Cuts and Pickles, $22; Bouchot Mussel Stew, to share, $39; Charred Swordfish, Orange and Fennel, $48.
Location Bukit Pasoh, Singapore.
Good for Loud nights out with genuinely good wine, natural wine converts and skeptics alike, and anyone who has ever called a wine "too easy" and meant it as an insult.
