What are Wine Clubs & how do they Work?

What is a wine club, in short?

• A wine club is essentially a subscription-based wine delivery club, a service you sign up and pay for that will send you wine on some sort of periodic basis
• Wine clubs are generally themed, perhaps for a region or a country
• However, as many wine clubs are run by shops or sommeliers, the monthly offerings will then usually be differently themed, i.e. Mendoza Malbecs or Lesser-Known Moldovan Whites
• They can be a great way of spicing up your wine experience, bringing you into contact with wines you might not have come across independently, and saving you some of the time and expense of trial and error thanks to being pre-selected by experts
• At another level however, they can be a terrific way of deepening your knowledge of an area of wine, trying a great variety of wines from a region or a country, really getting to know in detail the variety and subtle differences of wines from, for instance, Burgundy, or Rioja, or Valpolicella…
• All in all, a wine club is a great addition to your oenological experience, a great opportunity to expand your degustatory horizons, and an easy-going, terrific-value way of deepening your knowledge of wine.

How does a wine club actually work?

Still here? Well then – shall we go a bit more in depth? There’s a lot to discuss with wine clubs to be fair, but perhaps it’s best to look at where they come from. The idea may seem pretty obvious, but you might be surprised to hear how recent the phenomenon is, let alone their phenomenal growth.

The history
Given that it is a relatively new affair, it’s no surprise then that the first ever wine club – indeed the whole idea of them – originated in California. The Wine of the Month Club was started by a retail businessman named Paul Kalemkiarian Sr. in 1972 out of his Palos Verdes Liquor store which he purchased as a condition of his acquiring the adjacent pharmacy, whereupon he transformed the old shop owned by one Walter Reese into Palos Verdes Wines and Spirits. A real wine lover, he found himself jumping next door from his pharmacy to rescue perplexed shoppers, and came up with what – to his mind – was a shortcut. To help out his customers, who in those days were less likely to know about wine than in our own times, he would select a monthly favourite red and white and, for a subscription and delivery fee, mail them out to customers who had signed up. It was a neat and efficient way for customers to get a recommendation without having to drag poor Kalemkiarian in from his pharmacy business next door!

The idea proved an astonishing success, one of those things so simple and so useful it was really remarkable that nobody had thought of it before. Taken over by his son Paul Jr. in 1989, Paul Sr.’s new club became the prototype for a flurry of similar ones in the California area. It wasn’t just that they were so useful to customers – winemakers were helped by them to get put on the map, reaching casuals and connoisseurs alike that they might never have managed to on their own. The idea was so popular with vendors and customers that, by just after the turn of the millennium, they accounted for nearly a quarter of all wine sales in the United States! And that number has only grown in the last few years, with wine clubs forming an absolutely essential part of the revenues for wineries, retailers and others during the global pandemic.

So the conclusions are made, the evidence is in, it seems pretty clear: wine clubs are an enormous success, and here very firmly to stay. But the next question is – why exactly are they so popular and so successful? What do they bring to the table (well other than wine, obviously)?

The advantages

We’ve laid out a few in the short version above, but really the plus points of joining a wine club are many and varied, legion and myriad. We’ll just try and guide you through a few here.

Firstly, as mentioned (and as Paul Kalemkiarian envisaged), it’s a great way to discover new wines. Whoever it is curating a subscription’s wine list, be it a sommelier, a winemaker, a retailer or anyone else, they earn their money by utilising their knowledge to provide variety and excitement to the customer; for the customer, conversely, it represents a way to gain some of that knowledge in perhaps the most relaxed way possible – the gradual accretion of knowledge over many many months of learning by drinking! What could be more civilised? The curator will be able to advise you as to aspects of the wine (tannic? Acidic? Full or light bodied? etc.), as well as potential food pairings, some background information on the grapes, the story of the area or region, something of a vintage report and, for higher-end wine clubs, even a bit of an answer to any ageability questions. Moreover, one of the truly great things about wine is how it changes year after year, with endless new bottles and vintages and even whole wineries or wine regions being discovered, and you can expect a wine club, a good wine club, to be as endlessly rewarding as well.

Secondly, and additionally, you can use a wine club’s expertise to deepen your knowledge of a wine style, region, grape, whichever it may be. There are clubs devoted to reds, whites, pinks and sparklings, every varietal from albariño to zweigelt and every area that grows wine from Patagonia to Yamanashi (the long way round). The value of these types of wine club is to those who have a particular love and passion for something particular in wine, however niche, and don’t just want to enjoy their favourite tipple, but also wish to learn everything there is to know about it. This is the idea of going narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow in your wine knowledge. But of course, it doesn’t stop here – there are also different wine clubs for different generations, for different price points, for burgeoning areas like ecologically-friendly, vegan, and natural wines, and so on. All in all, the knowledge advantages of a wine club are very considerable.

Another favourable point about wine clubs is how much bother it takes out of your shopping! By outsourcing this aspect of a groceries trip (namely the ‘quality wine’ aspect) you free up just that extra bit of psychological space which you can use to do something else – for instance, spend extra time tasting and learning about quality wine!

The practical, how-does-it-work stuff

As you can imagine there is no single blueprint for how to do this. Some people do it monthly, some people do it quarterly, and although those are the most popular there really is no limit on how frequent or infrequent they might be. Added to which the number of wines chosen for the service can vary greatly – the famous aforementioned Wine of the Month Club started by selecting just one white and one red per month, though this has since expanded enormously. It’s normal practice for a range to be offered, and for the quantity of individual bottles to be calculated by the half-dozen and dozen (it’s common for clubs, especially prominent ones, to have deals with particular wineries or suppliers in order to offer deals!). Usually one of each bottle is offered, but again, this can change.

In Conclusion

So really, in the end, it depends what kind of wine club suits you and your wine habits! How often you like to open a bottle and between how many people, what kind of wine you like the most, how much you like to pay, whether your a risk-and-exploration kind of wine fan or a loyalist to the tried-and-true, and so on.
And of course, stay tuned for how our very own wine club might be the one for you….