There’s a second thread running through the Inn’s story, and it’s one Irving comes by honestly. He’ll tell you up front that he isn’t a sommelier and never had any formal training. Everything he knows about wine he learned the way the best things usually get learned — at the dinner table, over a great many years.

He has been in the hotel business since 1977 and captivated by wine since he was a teenager. His father was a serious collector with a wonderful habit: he opened exceptional bottles to share with his three sons at dinner. That’s how a boy came to taste Château Mouton Rothschild and Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet — first-growth Bordeaux and grand white Burgundy most people wait a lifetime to try. It set the bar early and shaped his palate for good.

His career kept placing him at the right moment. In 1980, just as Napa was announcing itself to the world, Irving was an Assistant Manager at the flagship Hyatt Regency San Francisco — the epicenter of American wine — home to Hugo, a five-star restaurant with one of the finest wine lists in the country. He came up under a genuine hospitality legend, his mentor Peter Goldman of Fairmont and Hyatt fame, and his standards were sharpened further by industry icons like Dennis Berkowitz, Stan Bromley, Horst Schulze, and Nelson Zager. That grounding taught him to think about wine not merely as a collector, but in the context of great hospitality.

As General Manager of the Doral Ocean Beach Resort in Miami, he found himself at the center of the wine world in a new way, becoming deeply involved in the South Florida Food and Wine Festival — an event that helped pave the way for what is known today as the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. In late January 1993, Doral’s famous Starlight Roof hosted a now-legendary dinner, “Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire,” the festival’s official kickoff, whose success laid the groundwork for lasting collaborations with Marvin Shanken and his magazines. Along the way came once-in-a-lifetime experiences — among them a private Château Montelena vertical tasting spent talking wine with the legendary Mike Grgich, the winemaker whose 1973 Chardonnay bested France’s finest white Burgundies at the 1976 Judgment of Paris. For a man raised on his father’s Bordeaux who then watched Napa rise firsthand, it was about as full-circle as a wine life gets.

By 2008, with the St. George Inn running well, Irving finally had room to re-engage with wine on his own terms. A trip to San Francisco led to touring Napa and Sonoma with John Burdick of Burdick Vineyard Tours — a friendship that, over the years, opened perhaps sixty rare wineries and doors to true legends: Robin Lail, daughter of Inglenook’s John Daniel Jr.; celebrated Sonoma winemaker Richard Arrowood; vintner and screenwriter Robert Kamen; and Philippe Melka, one of the finest winemakers of his generation. By 2014, Irving belonged to more than fifty wine clubs, with exceptional bottles arriving from every corner of the country.

All of it led to something the family is deeply proud of. When the Inn expanded to thirty-five rooms in 2016, a wine bar felt like the perfect addition. Irving reached out to his friends across those wine clubs to learn which of their labels were available through Florida distributors — and Bin 39 was born, opening with nineteen wines by the glass. It didn’t stay there. Today, Bin 39 pours 125 wines by the glass — one of the largest by-the-glass programs anywhere — each served through Coravin technology so every bottle is poured at its peak. The cellars now hold more than 3,000 bottles.

But the real reason behind Bin 39 has nothing to do with size. It exists to help guests fall in love with wine — to strip away the intimidation and self-importance that scares so many people off, so that the next time they open a wine list at a fine restaurant, they feel completely at home. That is the spirit of the whole Inn: a lifetime of world-class hospitality experience, offered without a trace of pretense.