We watch a lot of TCM, so of course we see commercials for the TCM Wine Club.
I’m sure they don’t do this, but I keep imagining they buy a bunch of Charles Shaw (Two-Buck Chuck back home, Three-Buck Chuck up here) and putting it into fancy bottles and charging a bundle for it.
My sister’s label has a wine club that we’ve been members of for a few years. It’s 6 bottles of wine every quarter and a discounted price, and we easily drink that, plus a few extra purchases. The wine is excellent (my BIL is the winemaker and he knows his stuff) and we even get in on the early tastings to help guide the blending. Most quarters there is one mandatory bottle and we get to pick the rest. We mostly drink reds but in the summer I like the rose as well, and maybe a brut.
I haven’t been interested in a wine club that isn’t associated with a particular winery. That serves a very different purpose; kind of a wine of the month club.
NPR has a wine club as well, and Googling, both are operated by a company called Laithwaites.
“operated by” may mean they handle the fulfillment logistics and admin; they aren’t the supplier of the wine.
I’d be highly suspicious of something like TCM. As you say: re-packaged plonk for premium prices.
I’ve been a member of a couple of winery-specific clubs over the years, but that stemmed from visits to the wineries, liking their product and their proprietors, and picking a small enough outfit that they didn’t distribute nationally, but large enough they actually had some interesting varieties of product. And each in turn eventually became too boring and one dimensional and was dropped.
I’d ask the OP to fall back and consider his personal answer to “why a wine club?”
If you’re looking for a sorta-curated tour of what the industry has to offer, plenty of advice websites offer that; you just need to do buying yourself on the open market.
If you’re looking for bargains, hit the oddball booze outlets near you, try lots of stuff at or slightly above your usual price point, and keep good notes.
etc.
A wine club is a good answer to some questions. But if it’s not to the question you’re asking, then it’s not a good answer.
Of course not. The first thing they ask you when you go to the NPR or TCM wine club website is to ask which state you’re in. Based on that, you may be redirected to the site of a company licensed to sell and ship wine in your state.
My sister’s winery uses a single company that handles alcohol regulations in all 50 states. Getting different contracts with many different companies to distribute wine would be very inefficient. They need to know the state they are shipping to in order to get the proper paperwork and payments.
Before that they worked with individual states to get licensed for distribution. It was a slow, painful, expensive process and you had to go through it before you had orders from those states. There are distributors that specialize in that type of operation, it’s best to let them handle it.
Since What_Exit bumped this thread…
Oh, I don’t mind plonk… because it’s cheap. (Costco has Kirkland cabernet sauvignon for eight bucks for a 1.5 litre bottle.)
I’m not considering a wine club. It’s just that they advertise it so much that it brings the cynic out in me. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate really good wine; but I drink wine with dinner almost every night so all I need is a ‘table wine’. Fine wine is for when we go out.