THREE FRIENDS,
Elite Spirits Club began over a long dinner in Mumbai, with a question none of us could answer. Five years and a few addresses later, it is the answer we wished we had been given.
It was an October evening in 2021, at Hitchki in Hiranandani. Three friends, one corner table, a wine list as long as a novel and a whisky menu that gave us prices but never a single explanation. Priti asked the simplest question of the night: “Which of these is actually worth it?”
Nobody at the table knew. So we did what everyone does — we reached for our phones. What we found was a thousand shop pages and almost no honest ones. Plenty of places to buy a bottle; almost nowhere that told you what it really tasted like, where it came from, or how to stand in the room where it was made.
That was the strange part. The three of us had spent years travelling for exactly this: tasting rooms, cellar doors, distillery roads, strangers pouring something they were proud of. We were hopeless romantics about wine and whisky — and still, the best information we owned lived in our heads, our photos and the backs of old receipts.
Somewhere between the main course and the second round, Shalini said it out loud: “Then let’s write the page we couldn’t find.”
The napkin · Hitchki, Hiranandani
- 1Tell the truth about the liquid.
- 2Start with the place, not the price.
- 3Never sell. Only share.
— the three rules we still keep —
HOW IT SHAPED
- Day one20 Oct 2021
The first page goes live
Ten days after that dinner we started building. The very first version was almost embarrassingly small: a handful of bottles, a few honest tasting notes and a map we drew ourselves. But it was real, and it was ours. The date we began, 20 October 2021, is the one we count from.
- Year oneNotes before code
We wrote before we built
We made a pact: no bottle gets a page until one of us has tasted it, or someone we trust has. We wrote about peat, about agave, about oak, the way we would explain it to a friend across a table. The design could wait. The honesty could not.
- Years two & threeA few addresses
The club keeps moving house
Over the years the site lived at different web addresses. Each move taught us something — faster pages, cleaner maps, kinder words. Each time we rebuilt a little more of it, and carried the community with us. Before it was a club, it was a restless project looking for the right home.
- The pocket editionOur mobile app
The road-trip companion
The best moments always happened away from a desk: in the car between distilleries, at a tasting-room door, in a bar with one bar-stool free. So the club learned to fit in a pocket. The mobile app grew out of that — flavour wheels you can read in dim light, cocktail ratios you can scale with one thumb, waypoints that still work when the signal doesn’t.
- TodayFive years on
Elite Spirits Club
Five years after a dinner that ran out of answers, we have a home of our own and a growing table of members who bring their own notes, their own roads and their own bottles to share. It is exactly the page we could not find that night, and it is still free, still honest and still not for sale.
THE FOUNDERS
- 5years and counting
- 3friends, one table
- 1napkin, three rules
- 0bottles sold, ever
“Every good bottle has a place behind it. We just wanted to write the place down.”
— Sachin, Priti & Shalini
By the numbers: 26 bottles profiled · 14 cocktails · 34 mapped waypoints.