A wine destination like no other? The Masters, April 9-12, 2026
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I spent about two hours researching the wine scene in and around Augusta National for Masters Week. While it’s known the Club itself has a fabulous wine program that I hope to profile one day (got about as much chance of that as I do playing there), the rest of the area seems to be devoid of good wine with one noteworthy exception:
Cork and Flame in Evans (18 minutes from Augusta National with no traffic) is a world class wine destination. It opened originally as a retail store in 2004 and in 2018 expanded to include a high-end restaurant, so you get the best of both worlds. Wine List
The outstanding list now includes about 3000 different wines and 10,000 bottles on premise. You can buy any wine to take out or choose while dining and many of the prices are terrific, both on the lower and upper tiers of reputation and quality. The variety of interesting wines under $50 a bottle is really kind of astonishing and you can find everything from assyrtiko to txakolina along the way. There’s a sweet spot of great selections from $100-150 with some of the lowest restaurant prices I’ve ever seen. If that weren’t enough, the combined enterprise endeavors to ensure that as much staff as possible receives some WSET training and they even offer the classes to the public. From a distance this appears to be a premium operation all the way around, and worth a visit even if I never sniff the hallowed grounds.
Smart money strategy: get to Cork and Flame early, have dinner, stock up your AirBnB with great wine for the duration.
Since there’s nothing else to talk about, why not spend a minute on Rory’s 2026 Champions Dinner Menu. I read that at an estimated $318 per head, the food is 50% more expensive than the next closest competitor’s, who would be Hideki Matsuyama if you’re curious, and definitely not Bubba Watson’s Mac and Cheese.
The wines Rory is serving are all among the greatest, most expensive wines on the planet and really need no introduction. I actually tried to figure it out and if you allot one pour to each of about 30 past champions, the wine alone would set Rory back about $40,000 at current retail prices. Fortunately for him, that’s not the way Augusta National’s wine program works, and it’s more likely he paid substantially less since the wines would have been acquired at release and presumably marked up almost nothing. Of course, this is just a guess, which is why I’d love to write an in-depth profile someday, both about this little publicized aspect of the Club and now that I know, Rory’s wine education. He is the newly crowned Swig Coach GOAT of golf and wine.
