I’ve mentioned wine clubs to folks who don’t spend much time in tasting rooms.
“I think there’s one of those around here,” one woman said.
A wine club, right? A place where like-minded people get together to sniff and sip? Not exactly what I’d meant. At wineries, club membership is more like frequent-buyer programs. It gives wineries a consistent source of income. It gives me a consistent source of wine. Signing up means agreeing to buy something like a case of wine a year, or maybe three or four bottles every three or four months.
The wine shipments are discounted—and that’s the big draw. Some wineries release special bottles, limited-production stuff, only to their members.
As a member, a simple aficionado like me gets to feel like a member of the winery’s extended family—drinking with the homies, at a place where everybody knows your name.
I’ve been a member of as many as nine wine clubs at the same time. My husband Dave is also a joiner. Once, between us, we were in 14 wine clubs. That’s before we maintained two separate households. Now I’m in two clubs.
The trend’s obvious: I join when I’m a little tipsy, usually after I’ve tasted wine at one or two places during a trip to wine country. I can resist the impulse for my first few ounces of wine. But by the third or fourth winery, I’m itching to hand over my credit card.
The process can be accelerated by a trip to a winery’s barrel room. That’s where a prospect gets to taste unbottled wine to identify its potential. Wine out of a barrel is deceptively light, but jam-packed with alcohol. Oh, yes, this is good! I’m fine. I’m fine. Then I’m signing on the line.
I joined a club the first time I went wine-tasting in Amador County. Dave and I barely dented the long list of places to go. The Amador Vintners Association has 40 members, all with tasting rooms. And not all wineries are members.
So much wine. So little lunch. So fast to sloshy am I.
By Winery No. 3, I was ready for the pitch: Do I want to buy the yummy wine I’m drinking for less, less, less? Do I want to drive back to Amador for free pasta? Because I’ve been invited to join Villa Toscano’s Bella Piazza wine club! All I have to do is fill out a card, hand over my credit card information—and I’m one of them.
The thought of a pasta buffet hooked me. Free noodles sounded irresistible to my growling stomach. I imagined coming back for a weekend and dining on linguine dripping with pesto. Sampling wine and more wine.
Over the years, we’ve been back to Amador plenty of times. I never did get to the pasta buffet.
No matter. Wine club wine, it turns out, is the gift that keeps on giving—and the charges on your credit card keep mounting. If you can’t pick up this season’s shipment at the winery, they’ll ship it to you.
You can cancel. But that means a phone call. Or an email. So much work!
These days, I join clubs to buy consistently great wine that’s more affordable to members. As a member of Myka Cellars in the Santa Cruz Mountains, wine crafted by genius winemaker Mica Raas is half-price all the time. That $44 bottle of 2011 Reserve Malbec? It’s $22, any time I want it. Which is basically now.
Locally, Tulip Hill’s September wine-club shipment included four bottles of wine, retail value $132, for $60. That means I basically paid about $15 for the newly released 2010 Tracy Hills Inamorata—a mouth full of flowers and raspberries! (Opened it within days. Drank it. Mmm.) It’s $36 in the tasting room.
Most wine clubs include free tasting flights for self, partner and friends. Some tempt me with winery swag. At one winery, new members were rewarded with a wine glass that holds an entire bottle. Who thinks that’s a good idea? I do.
When we were members of Winery by the Creek in Fair Play, we could sign up to spend a night in the winemaker’s cottage—in the middle of the vineyard—for the cost of cleaning the unit. If we timed it right, we could be there for the sister winery’s all-you-can-eat pizza buffet on Friday nights. So, it was like $40 or $50 to eat, drink and stay in a cute cottage in a field of wine on the vine. Yeah!
Unlike the pasta buffet, we actually made this happen. Twice.
And the Winery by the Creek’s wine kept coming. Shipments of six bottles at a time. Drinkable and affordable. We possessed our own wine jug that we could refill with sfuso—loose wine—from a giant stainless steel tank. Damn, I’m pretty sure we had two refillable wine jugs.
Finally, though, I dashed off the sad email. Consider me cancelled. I did the same with seven or eight other wineries.
Why would I end such beneficial relationships? To save the expense, sure. And the wine was piling up, indeed. But most importantly, the upside of wine clubs is also the downside: We ended up going back to favorite wine regions and spending all our time at member wineries, picking up bottles for which we’d already paid, and tasting loved but now-familiar wines.
It was hard to discover new bottles of bliss.
Sometimes you want to go where everybody does not know your name. But they’re still glad you came. They might even take you into the back and give you some of whatever’s in the barrel.
Below: A perk for members—the pond-side picnic grounds at Indian Rock Vineyards in Murphys, Calif.
