『Katie & Denny Culbert – Wild Child Wines』のカバーアート

Katie & Denny Culbert – Wild Child Wines

Katie & Denny Culbert – Wild Child Wines

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概要

 Wild Child Wines is one of those rare downtown spots that feels instantly like a neighborhood living room—warm, inviting, and full of discovery. In this episode of Discover Lafayette, we sit down with Katie and Denny Culbert, the couple behind Lafayette’s signature natural wine shop and wine bar, to talk about how Wild Child began, how it grew, and why it’s become a destination for locals and visitors alike. Along the way, we also explore their other creative ventures—Katie’s long-running boutique, Kiki, and Denny’s career as a professional photographer whose work has taken him deep into food, place, and storytelling. Their vision and dedication to hospitality and curated wine culture earned Wild Child Wines a 2026 James Beard Award semifinalist nomination in the Outstanding Bar category, one of the highest honors in the American culinary and beverage world. This is really a major moment for Lafayette’s food and drink scene. Katie and Denny’s story starts, fittingly, in Lafayette’s community orbit. Denny was photographing an event for the newspaper. “It happened to be Palates and Pate. A big fundraiser,”when their paths crossed. Katie remembers she was in her late 20s, and after a mutual friend introduced them, they “found the same friend group at the same time.” Denny wasn’t from Lafayette originally; he moved to South Louisiana for journalism, explaining, “I grew up in northeastern Ohio, but I moved to Baton Rouge in 2008 to intern for the Advocate” before landing a job at The Daily Advertiser. Working for the paper, he says, became the fastest way to understand Acadiana: “I’ve been to every single high school gymnasium, every festival, every school board meeting.” He even created a column called Dishing It Out, where he’d spend time inside local restaurants and build photo essays from the same set of questions he asked each owner, every time. Katie’s background is equally rooted in local business and community. She has spent years helping operate Kiki, the boutique founded by her mother, Kiki Frayard, and describes how she stepped in to help make the business viable beyond its early stage: “Not so much with the creative side of it, more with the bookkeeping, looking at numbers and keep making it a viable business.” That blend: Katie’s retail and business instincts and Denny’s creative storytelling, formed a foundation for what became Wild Child Wines. Runaway Dish – “Their former life” “We used to have a magazine when we were doing Runaway Dish, a physical magazine that went along with each dinner. We’d do a chef interview and then farmer interviews for all the products that we were using. That also influenced Wild Child Wines, being in that world. It’s definitely how we ended up here because we met so many chefs. Denny was photographing chefs in their kitchens for the paper. And then beyond that, chefs really didn’t know one another. There was not a tight knit chef community. The goal was to bridge that and start these dinners where we’d get two chefs together, they come up with a menu, we pay for everything, and then any sous chefs could come and hang out and help, or just watch. It brought all these cool gangs of people together that we didn’t really know and they didn’t know each other. We’d get together every few months.” The idea for Wild Child Wines grew out of lived experience, not a business plan on paper. The couple traveled frequently for work, ate in great restaurants, met chefs, and kept discovering wines that simply weren’t available in Lafayette. Katie describes how a shift happened while traveling: “It changed my thinking and perspective on what wine was and could be. It opened my eyes.” She remembers thinking, “Instead of driving to New Orleans and getting cases of wine every time we go, maybe we could just open a tiny wine shop.” They already had a downtown space; Denny had been renting it since 2016 as studio and workspace, so the “tiny wine shop” idea became real. Wild Child Wines opened in January 2020, just weeks before the world changed. “Right before Covid,” they say, an unexpected test for any new business. But their concept proved resilient. “Everyone still needed wine,” Katie says, and the shop pivoted fast. “We made a website overnight,” they recalled, creating pickup windows where they’d be “boxing wine, drinking wine, handing wine to people.” Looking back, they describe it as a strange but workable season: “For us personally, it was okay… the right concept.” A big part of the Wild Child experience is how they talk about wine, without intimidation, and with a deep respect for where it comes from. Katie explains that wine is, at its core, agriculture: “Wine is an agricultural product. It’s grapes.” Over time, she says, wine became commercialized and manipulated: “When you look at what wine has become, it’s become this process where lots of things are ...
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