Join A Club? Wine Not!

Groucho Marx didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member, but I’m a little less discriminating. Any club that involves wine, sounds like a great idea to me.

Although my love affair with wine started a long time ago, I’ve had to admit recently that I know very little about it.  Up until this point, I’ve been of the Dr. Seuss philosophy: I will drink it with a fox, I will drink it from a box, I will drink it from a shoe, I will probably drink more than you. I would say I’m much more of a wine enthusiast than a wine expert. I know I like Pinot Grigio and Malbec, so I simply buy what’s on sale or what has a cute label. Once the holidays roll around, however, I find myself staring blankly at the wine section with the same panic I used to reserve for the video store: instant confusion and self-doubt.

I love bringing wine as a host gift, because it might help them out that night or it might be something they can enjoy later. It will no doubt become useful to them at some point. When you’re bringing wine as gift to someone, however, it does help to know a little something about it. When I’ve presented my gift in the past, just one follow up question about the bottle has turned me into some sort of stammering cavewoman. “It’s red. Good. Australia.” And then I make a beeline for the cheese platter where I eat my shame.

So this holiday season, I’ve decided to give myself an early present: a wine club. For the next few months I will have several bottles of wine, selected by actual experts, and delivered right to my door – for less money than I’ve been spending at the store. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. In the past I’ve thought of these clubs as exclusive cliques for sommeliers, but these packages are actually perfect for us wine novices, too. And in most cases, the selections also come with actual information about the wine so I don’t have to go Cro-Magnon at the cocktail hour.

Wine Insiders has an amazing deal at the moment. You can choose an all red club, an all white club or a mixed club. Then they’ll deliver 12 bottles of wine to your door every other month for $89.99! And the first month you order, they throw in an extra 3 bottles to say thanks. Since shipping is a whopping one cent per bottle, that means I’ll only be spending $6 per bottle during the first two months (they did that math for me, too). This means I’ll be showing up at every Thanksgiving party, football party and all of the early Christmas and Hanukkah celebration with a bottle of fine wine. And I might even be on time for things this year, since I won’t have to stop at the store on the way there! Cheers to that.