Best Wine Club for 2022 – CNET [CNET]

There’s never been a better time to join a wine subscription club, where the are seemingly endless and clubs have gotten major upgrades as of late. While there’s no denying the appeal of visiting a winery and exploring new bottles at their source, wine subscriptions can bring you offerings from smaller, more remote wineries you wouldn’t discover otherwise as well as limited-batch and private label wines, international and boutique wines, and personalized bottles to match your flavor preferences. Finding the perfect bottle has never been simpler. The best wine subscriptions go above and beyond the choice of red wine, white wine, rosés or sparkling wine — they can also offer vintages while other clubs may offer vegan or organic wine. Finding the best wine subscription will ultimately depend on your palate and preferences.

Read more: What’s the Difference Between Natural and Organic Wine?

Today, newer wine clubs and wine subscriptions, such as the Gold Medal Wine Club, Virgin Wines and Oregon Wine are some of the most powerful players in the vintner industry, with an understanding of niche branding and purchase patterns, taking advantage of slick interfaces and advanced wine-tasting algorithms, while other operations scramble to catch up. This all makes the monthly wine club world even denser. And though it’s true that competition keeps prices down, with so many options out there, you have to wade through a veritable sea of wine purveyors to find the best wine club for your tastes, habits and budget.

So then, we ask: Which is the best wine club or wine subscription for you? You may want to start by asking yourself a few questions that go beyond red or white, flat or sparkling. Do you want a wine service that is highly curated to your specific tastes and favorite wine types? Do you have a roster of usual wines or would you rather try (mostly) new wine? Perhaps you’d like a master sommelier sharing their tasting notes and opinions of certain bottles? Are you looking for premium fine wine or a bottle of some other artisanal specialties? Then there are vegan wines, naked wines, organic and biodynamic wines to consider, each with a niche wine club or two specializing in them. Most importantly you must decide what a high quality bottle of wine should cost you.

If all of the subscription options seem overwhelming, I get it. It’s like being in the wild west of wine country without a guide. The best wine subscription can seem elusive on this bottle-littered horizon. That’s why we canvassed the landscape to uncork the most delicious wine delivery options — from wine subscription box arrivals that specialize in monthly bottle surprises to services curated to your exacting vino standards. These offer thoughtful selection, great customer service, helpful tasting notes from trained sommeliers and tremendous value for any wine lover, delivering fabulous bottles straight to your wine rack, fridge, cellar (or couch — no judgment here). Below you’ll find important information on the most popular wine clubs to help you find the best wine subscription service for you. 

Note that this list was originally written before the pandemic. We continue to monitor the operational capacity of each company and regularly update the article accordingly.

Read more: Best Meat Delivery and Subscription Services

Our picks were chosen through a mix of personal experience, reviews from industry-leading wine and food sites and customer reviews from third-party review platforms such as TrustPilot and HighYa. We also took into consideration factors such as customer service, ease of site navigation and breadth of wines to choose from to help you find the best wine subscription service, but to be clear we did not personally test every service. We will update this list as we try new services.

Which subscriptions didn’t make the cut and why

Our picks were chosen through a mix of personal experience, reviews from industry-leading wine and food sites, and customer reviews from casual enthusiasts via third-party sites like TrustPilot and HighYa. We also took into consideration factors such as customer service, ease of site navigation and breadth of selection.

Though media companies are credited with kicking off the wine club renaissance in 2008 (think The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times), they use one of a few, massive wine merchants to fill their orders. As a result, these companies, along with older clubs like Laithwaite’s and Turner Classic Movies’, essentially pull from the same lot, often marking up prices in the process. The lack of value and unique offerings excluded these services from our list. Some of the older clubs like Vinesse and California Wine Club do deliver a high-quality selection, but they also have text-heavy sites that are exhausting to navigate as well as cancellation policies that involve tedious phone calls.

Winc and Firstleaf are great examples of quiz-based wine clubs that offer customizable breadth to consumers. However, Bright Cellars, which also uses a quiz to discern customers’ likes and dislikes, did not make our list. We found that this particular club ships lackluster wines, the palate quiz often spits out the same or nearly identical recommendations for very different people and its customer service could be better.

Wine Awesomeness, which taps into millennial wanderlust with its international offerings, gets tons of press (it even publishes its own magazine). Despite this impeccably crafted aesthetic, the club’s subscribers and reviewers found the wines boring and also reported some serious shipping issues. 

Tasting Room was considered for our trial-size wine pick, but it has gained a reputation as a bait-and-switch service. Most online reviewers loved the introductory taste test, only to be disappointed with the wine curation afterwards. 

In recent years, food-delivery services have also gotten into the wine-subscription service. Both Blue Apron and HelloFresh rolled out wine subscription add-ons to their popular meal delivery services. Blue Apron’s smaller, half-liter offerings tend to be more premium than HelloFresh’s, but both have a strong hit-or-miss reputation and don’t take your palate into consideration by only providing direct meal pairings, which is why they ultimately didn’t make our list.

We absolutely loved the premium, boutique wine offerings of Pour This from renowned sommelier Ashley Ragovin, but her subscription service has been terminated. We looked into SommSelect monthly wine club as an alternative, but its selection is more closely aligned with that of The Panel than the rare finds Ragovin could produce.

More wine advice and delivery service recommendations 

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This article was written by J. Fergus and originally published earlier on Chowhound.