The solo female travel experience you didn't know existed
You want to go to Europe. You want it to feel special, not stressful. And you're tired of options that assume you either have a perfectly aligned friend group or you're happy winging it alone.
The problem with planning solo travel in Europe
Solo female travel in Europe has never been more popular, and yet the options still feel oddly limited. On one end, you've got the party hostel circuit, which is brilliant at 22 and exhausting at 32. On the other end, coach tours and couples packages that were designed for someone else entirely. And then there's the DIY route: building your own itinerary, booking your own accommodation, and arriving somewhere beautiful only to realise that doing everything alone isn't quite the same as freedom.
What most women actually want sits somewhere in the middle. Not a package holiday. Not a solo backpacking trip. Something curated, social, and genuinely enjoyable.
That's exactly why I started Amica Vina. And if you've never come across a small group wine retreat before, it's worth understanding what that actually means.
So what is a group wine retreat, exactly?
Strip away the word "wine" for a second, and the concept is simple: a small group of women travelling together to a beautiful part of Europe, with accommodation, transport, activities, and meals taken care of. No itinerary-building, no group chats trying to align six different schedules, no showing up somewhere and figuring it out as you go.
The wine part is the setting, not the subject. You don't need to know anything about it, and honestly, some of my favourite guests arrive knowing next to nothing and leave having had the best time of anyone.
Wine regions happen to sit in some of the most quietly stunning countryside in Europe. Provence at golden hour is unlike anywhere else in Europe. Bordeaux's countryside has a kind of unhurried elegance that city travel rarely offers. Alsace feels like a place Walt Disney invented.
It's not all about the wine. It's about the dream girls’ trip these wine regions make possible.
"Think of it less as a wine education trip and more as a very well-chosen reason to go somewhere beautiful with people you’ll actually like."
Why small groups of women change everything
Here's what most group tour operators don't think about: filling a trip and curating a trip are completely different things.
The standard model is simple enough: get enough bookings, put people on a coach, and move them through a schedule. Whether the group actually gels, whether anyone makes a real connection, whether the woman who booked solo feels comfortable by day two — that's largely not the operator's problem. The seats are full. Job done.
Amica Vina was created around the opposite logic. Groups are deliberately kept to six to twelve women. Every retreat is designed for women travelling solo or as a pair, which means there are
no existing cliques,
no couples quietly retreating to their own bubble,
no groups of friends who already have ten years of in-jokes and no particular need for new ones.
Everyone arrives the same way, slightly wondering if they'll fit in, and that shared starting point matters more than most people realise.
I travel with every group. I'm not a tour guide with a clipboard and a headset. I'm at dinner, I'm at the winery, I'm there for the long evening conversations that nobody planned on having. Keeping that founder presence is something I'm deeply intentional about, because I think it changes everything about how a group feels.
Typical group tour vs Amica Vina retreat
30–50 people, whoever booked | 6–10 women, intentionally kept small
Coach transport, set stops | Private transport, curated venues
Mixed ages, couples, existing groups | Women 25–45, travelling solo or as a pair
Guide-led, not socially curated | Founder-hosted, socially designed
Rushed schedule, minimal breathing room | Balanced structure
You leave with a stamp in your passport | You leave with actual friends
On wine, and why it actually helps
There's a reason that across almost every culture, the best conversations happen around food and drink. Sharing a meal, or a glass, or an afternoon at a table with something good in front of you removes the pressure of having to perform connection. You're not standing at a networking event trying to think of something interesting to say. You're just there, somewhere beautiful, and conversation tends to happen on its own.
That's what wine does on these retreats. It's not the star of the show; it's the backdrop that makes everything else a little easier. The shared tasting where someone says the wrong thing confidently, and everyone laughs. The winemaker who turns out to be unexpectedly funny. The glass on the terrace before dinner, where you realise you've been talking for two hours without noticing.
You don't need to be a wine expert to enjoy a wine retreat.
Amica Vina is for you if
You keep putting off that trip to France
Not because you don't want to go, but because your friends can never quite get their dates to align, and the idea of going entirely alone feels like a lot. You want company that's already built in.
You're planning a bigger Europe trip
And you want one part of it to feel extra special, not just another city ticked off, but a few days to connect with like-minded solo female travellers and share new memories you’ll cherish.
You've done a group tour before and left a bit flat
Efficiently transported rather than actually hosted. You want something smaller and more considered, where the people around you were chosen with some thought, not just whoever filled the remaining seats.
You love wine, but not the pretension
The regions, the food, the setting, the pace, absolutely. A room full of people performing expertise and swirling glasses with great seriousness, less so. Amica Vina does wine the way it's actually meant to be enjoyed: with good company, no gatekeeping, and a genuine sense of fun.
