Matt Canals/Courtesy J Vineyards & Winery

Alexandra Grant drinking a glass of LOVE Wine

When Alexandra Grant was 12, her mother brought her to a cafe in Paris and ordered her a Coca-Cola. The server told the pair that Coke wasn’t good for a young girl and brought them a bottle of wine and two glasses instead.

Grant, a celebrated visual artist who splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, brings this bright, top-up-my-wine-glass energy to travel and her extensive slate of creative projects. She’s known for her exhibitions around the world; most recently, Grant debuted striking neon pieces at Warsaw’s Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature and silk-screen, acrylic, and colored pencil collages at France’s CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. (She’s also made headlines as Keanu Reeves’ girlfriend.)

Matt Canals/Courtesy J Vineyards & Winery

Pouring a bottle of LOVE Wine

This month, the global philanthropist launched a sparkling wine with Sonoma County’s J Vineyards & Winery called Love Wine—right in time for Valentine’s Day. A portion of the sales from the super-approachable, delicious brut cuvée benefits her grantLOVE foundation, which supports female and BIPOC artists.

“I’m convinced making a bottle of wine is a lot like making a work of art,” Grant told me when we met at the Love Wine preview at J Vineyards & Winery in Healdsburg, California. Another similarity, she pointed out, is that they’re both for any traveler. Wine and art can be your raison de voyager, whether you’re a Klimt connoisseur and an avid oenophile, or someone who likes a glass of white wine at a Parisian café and pokes their head into a gallery in a trendy neighborhood.

“You can enter from all different levels,” Grant said. “And both wine and art are more accessible than people think. I think they see it on that kind of higher level, like, ‘this isn’t for me, right?’” But both are for a wider audience, she insisted. That’s one of the goals of Love Wine; you can nerd out over the sparkling wine’s dosage—100 percent pinot meunier, per award-winning Sonoma winemaker Nicole Hitchcock—and stunning label, designed by interdisciplinary artist Genevieve Gaignard. But you can also see it as a delicious and extraordinarily pretty bottle of bubbly that transports you to the Northern California coast in one sip.

Courtesy J Vineyards & Winery

Sunset over J Vineyards Winery

When Grant and I sat down the next day at Farmhouse Inn, I told her my goal was to see more art when I traveled. How should someone like me—who took one art history class in college—actually do that?

“I think street art is a great way,” Grant said. “Certainly social media can play a positive role in discovery. I think a great way to find out about an art scene is to go to a bookstore that has a really good art book selection, because artists and curators and intellectuals are going to go to that place to buy their books, too.”

Grant has good luck finding local art shows from postings at bookshops because she tends to travel with locals rather than hitting a destination’s must-see attractions. “I’m not so interested in tourism,” she said. “I find it really confusing, the idea that I want to go stand in line and look at something and be hot.”

Instead, she loves to seek out a contemporary art museum, which she said is a great entry point for neophtye art fans. “When I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and seeing Hockney for the first time—there is something that’s beyond language about art. I understood then it was like an international code, you know, that art and the interest in it is shared internationally.”

Alexandra Grant

Aisle or window seat? 

Window

What’s one thing you can’t travel without? 

A great jacket with pockets.

How do you spend your time on flights? 

Writing and watching animated movies.

What’s your dream trip? 

Iceland.

Recently, Grant has been regularly traveling to Poland for work and plans to return to South Korea this year for an exhibition at the Plastic Art Seoul show in May 2025.

“I love the food in Korea, and the humor, even just the fact that the team I work with calls me Grant because of the way the language works,” she told me. “And then I just started going to Poland in the last four years—really exciting place to visit, very interesting cuisine, architecture, and a lot of dedication to culture in a way that’s very different from other places.”

As we wrapped up our rainy-day hangout, we ran through the tried-and-true travel questions (favorite plane movie?). Turns out, even Grant’s inflight routine revolves around art.

“My go-to move is to watch the latest animated movie on the plane; I’m often in the kids’ movie section. I’m the biggest fan of the artistry and the talent that goes into making those stories,” she said.

There you have it: Traveling for art starts at takeoff. For the full inspired-by-Alexandra-Grant travel treatment, order an in-flight glass of wine, too. Coca-Cola’s bad for you.