Wine Club Related Articles

Wine clubs are growing in popularity and area great way for beginners to sample new wines, and old-timers to focus on a region or type of wine.  Wine clubs vary in what they offer, how they offer it and the type of customer that is their target market.  Wine clubs also differ greatly in price as well.  One should be wary of some of the things that wine clubs can do that will take away from the experience.  This article details what some wine clubs do that don't respect their customers, and in the long run, can end up hurting their business.

In the past couple of days I've had a number of people ask me what wine clubs should never do. Clearly, I have a pretty lengthy list, but there are a couple of things that top my list, no club that wants to keep its customers should do either of these two, which each deal with shipping substandard alcohol in order to increase profits.

The first way in which a wine club would look to increase profits at the expense of its customers experiences would be to ship so called private label wine. A private label wine is often a bulk wine purchased from a region, instead of a winery and then packaged under a new label that is not selling wine elsewhere in the world. For example a company could buy a bulk wine from Italy at around $2 per bottle and then basically create a winery (or pay a less scrupulous one to use their branding) and sell the wine as fine Italian wine and charge $20 per bottle.

The second and more difficult scenario for a consumer in regards to a wine club is the use of special or close out wines. Wineries often have excess stock and are looking to liquidate it before their new harvest comes in from the field. The problem for customers is that this wine is often purchased on the bulk market and then packaged under a different brand name then the regular winery product. An unscrupulous club could buy this cheap, close out liquor and then market it as wine from the Robert Mondavi Winery. Although technically correct, it would greatly upset the winery which chose not the ship it itself, the quality would be questionable at best and the customers of its wine club would be purchasing wine that would not even be a high enough quality to be sold by the winery whose name appears on the brand.

I hope you've enjoyed this look into the world of 3rd party clubs. The only and best way to protect yourself is to do your own research. A club should be giving you a complete history of each and every bottle they have shipped. Look for critics scores, you should be able to recognize the names of the critics such as Robert Parker, Wine Spectator or Wine Enthusiast. If you can't find the winery doing a basic Google search and there are no substantial critics scores I would be very, very concerned over the type of wine that the club is planning on shipping.

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