Thursday, July 26, 2018

11 Wine Subscriptions to Toast to Each Month

Whether you’re a novice or an expert, wine clubs offer adventure and convenience every month or so. Some rely on quizzes while others choose for you, but every wine club is committed to helping you take the guesswork out of choosing a bottle of wine.

We reviewed the wine subscription landscape and uncorked the best ones. These services are easy to use, provide great value, and of course, ship delicious vino.

Best Wine Subscription for Most People

Winc wine subscription box

Winc

$13/bottle and up

Winc, formerly known as Club W, is a great wine subscription service. After taking a short quiz, you’re presented with dozens of wine options and four highlighted recommendations that should match your palate. If you already know what you like, you can choose which wines to add to your box, filtering options to find sweet, international, and/or vegan wines.

You don’t have to pick four wines, but it’s usually the easiest way to get to their free shipping minimum. If you don’t curate your box or forget to skip the month, your top recommendations will be shipped to you.

Winc sells both their own wines and wines from independent wineries for prices akin to those at your local grocery store. The Winc wines generally have more hits than misses, but a few misses nonetheless, while the indie wines rarely disappoint.

Even with the occasional poor pour, Winc provides an overall great value for the wines and user-friendly site. You receive a credit towards your next purchase for any wine you don’t enjoy. Plus, you can rate the wines out of five stars, which privately improves your future recommendations and publicly helps others make decisions.

You can skip a delivery, but you cannot pause your subscription, and you need to cancel via phone or online chat (the fastest way).

Depending on your wine knowledge and whether you find a few new favorites, you may stay with Winc for years or grow out of its selection in a few months. Either way, we think there’s something for everyone in this wine subscription.

Buy Now

Best Budget-Friendly Wine Subscription

Martha Stewart wine club subscription

Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart Wine Club

$50/6 weeks  $90/8 weeks

Leave it to Martha Stewart to make your wine habit more affordable. Stewart chooses all of the wines and everyone’s first box is identical (a mix of reds and whites), providing an introduction to the collection. Afterwards, deliveries can be customized to include all reds, all whites, or a mix.

With half cases costing $50 and a whole case amounting to $90, each bottle works out to less than $9. You can choose a half or full dozen case of wine to receive every six or eight weeks, respectively.

You’ll also get serving, pairing, and of course, entertaining tips with each case. In order to cancel or skip, you’ll need to reach out to customer service.

Buy Now

Best Subscription for Rare and Boutique Premium Wines

Pour This wine club subscription box

Pour This

Pour This

$125/month

Former A-list, Los Angeles sommelier Ashley Ragovin hand-picks the three bottles in every Pour This subscription. She started Pour This to share premium wines from very boutique, hard-to-find wineries with the public.

You’ll also get tasting and pairing information, plus, a CD full of tunes to drink to. There’s no customization here; you just have to trust that Ragovin is always right (she is).

Buy Now

Best Customizable Wine Subscription

Cellars Wine Club subscription box

Cellars Wine Club

Cellars Wine Club

$29 and up/month

Cellars Wine Club is actually 12 different wine clubs that you can switch around to your liking. A team of experts taste and choose the wines for the clubs every month.

Most clubs contain two bottles, but there are also single bottle, red trio, and case (a dozen bottles) options. Clubs are curated by themes like taste (Sweet Wines Club), region (West Coast Cub), and even wine scale ranking (90+ Point Club).

You can set the number of shipments, frequency, and the start month for each club, and applicable clubs let you choose your ideal reds to whites ratio. Switching clubs can be done online, but you have to cancel by reaching out to their customer service team.

Buy Now

Best Wine Subscription If You Like to Try Before You Buy

Vinebox wine club subscription box

Vinebox

Vinebox

$72 and up/quarter

No online tasting quiz here, just your actual taste buds! Vinebox lets you try before you buy with its quarterly wine subscription. Instead of getting stuck with entire bottles of random wines, you get nine small vials delivered every three months.

Until July 1st, 2018, Vinebox was a monthly subscription. The customer experience has changed only slightly, but the wine curation is focused even more discovery than before. You still have control over your preferred red to white ratio for your boxes.

The twist top vials hit the middle ground between a tasting pour and a standard glass pour. This way, you can try these wines and maybe even have enough to pair with a meal or just unwind at the end of the day. You can also double your box — saving 10 percent — if you want to get a friend or significant other in on the tasting experience. Vinebox uses a special rebottling process to preserve the wine’s taste, and each tube can keep the wine for three years.

If you really like one or more of your testers, you can buy a whole bottle on the Vinebox website (a perk for subscribers only). If you get a quarterly subscription, you get a $15 credit towards a full bottle each quarter, but if you pay for the full year, you’ll get a $30 credit each quarter. It’s also really easy to skip a month or cancel your subscription right from your online account.

Buy Now

Related Video: 10 Affordable Wines You Can Always Trust

Best Sparkling Wine and Rosé Subscription

Vinley Market wine club subscription box

Vinley Market

Vinley Market

$59/month

Bubbly and rosé lovers can finally get their fix without leaving their homes! Vinley Market ships out two bottles each month: one is always a sparkling wine (and can be Champagne, Cava, or Prosecco!) and the other is always a rosé. You’re always ready for a celebration with this subscription. We doubt you’ll get tired of these refreshing wines, but if you do, you can cancel through your online account or via email.

Is your rosé habit a little more serious? Winc’s Summer Societé delivers a sweet rosé throughout the summer months in magnum bottles (holding two bottles of wine) or smaller, glass-portioned bottles. The membership is currently sold out, but it recurs every summer and you can buy regular sized bottles through a normal Winc membership.

For a drier, more portable rosé, Una Lou also offers a summertime subscription in different quantities of 4-pack cans (equivalent to two wine bottles). Ninety Plus Cellars also does a seasonal subscription for their dry rosé.

Buy Now

Best Wine Subscription with In-Person Perks

The Panel wine club subscription box

The Panel

The Panel

$99/month and up

For some people, wine is a way of life, and The Panel understands that. Each month a panel of winemakers, sommeliers, and other wine experts blindly taste a selection of wines. You’ll then receive three or six of the best wines.

There are three tiers of membership which also give you access to The Panel’s lounge in Sonoma, California as well as invites to special events. The most premium membership includes luxe perks like cellar consultations. Any membership level is selective, so we can’t promise that you’ll be chosen right away (or at all).

Buy Now

Best Vegan Wine Subscription

Vegan Wines wine club subscription box

Vegan Wines

Vegan Wines

$50 and up/month

Knowing whether or not a wine is vegan at your local store is nearly impossible and you often need to do some sleuthing. Vegan Wines wants to take the research off your plate and fill your glass with vegan wines every month.

While some wine clubs, like Winc, will let you filter out non-vegan wines, you can trust everything Vegan Wines sends your way is vegan-friendly. You can choose from a starter box which includes two to three bottles of more affordable wines, or you could get three premium bottles in their other boxes: a mix, all reds, or a mix with three cheese pairings from Miyoko’s Creamery.

You can also change what kind of box you receive every month. In order to change your subscription type or cancel it you need to email their team before your next shipment.

Buy Now

Best Wine Subscription Gift Box for Her

Vine Oh! wine club subscription box

Vine Oh!

Vine Oh!

$60/box

You can receive Vine Oh! boxes quarterly or you can gift them. We recommend these boxes as a gift for a lovely lady in your life. Friends, wives, and mothers alike will love getting two delicious bottles of wine and five to six treats and products. The box is cute, fun, and costs half of what it’s worth, so what are you waiting for?
Buy Now

Best Wine Subscription Box for Cheese and Charcuterie Lovers

Wine Down Box wine club subscription box

Wine Down Box

Wine Down Box

$70/month

Want a party in a box? Wine Down Box has you covered. Wine Down Box sends you a great wine with perfect cheese and cured meat pairings. You might have a vague idea of what cheeses goes with different wines, but the rules don’t always apply to complex, nuanced bottles.

Each box includes a bottle of wine and the perfect cheese, meat, and artisanal crackers to pair with it. The perishables ship separately from the wine, but the packages are staggered so that they reach your home at about the same time. You’ll also get pairing notes to help turn you into a charcuterie expert.

If that weren’t enough, shipping is included in the cost and you can cancel your subscription at any time.

Buy Now

Best Subscription for People Who Don’t Drink a Lot of Wine

Ninety Plus wine club subscription box

Ninety Plus

Ninety Plus Cellars

$50/quarter and up

Maybe wine isn’t your drink of choice, but it’s nice to have a few bottles around. Ninety Plus Cellars ships rebranded wines from reputable wineries every three months. They purchase a small percentage of batches from vineyards with histories of highly rated wines and repackage them.

This way, you get three or six great (taste tested and quality assured) wines each quarter for a fraction of their cost. You can get their three best wines of the season, six reds, or a mix of six reds, whites, and occasional rosés and/or bubbly.  Some of the older wine subscriptions still do quarterly shipments, but we think Ninety Plus offers a better value and has a more user-friendly website.

Buy Now

Close, But No Cigar

There are many wine clubs and subscriptions out there, but not all of them are up to snuff. Many of the pioneers and newcomers of wine of the month clubs alike never really innovated on the model. Some of these services might ship good to excellent wine, but ultimately didn’t feel as special as our picks and/or lacked stand-out features.

Glassful (acquired by Invino) seems to be all but out of business, despite initial rave reviews. Their team likely improved Invino’s InClub which is a pretty good club that just got edged out by our picks in several categories. Older clubs like Vinesse and California Wine Club have text-heavy sites that were exhausting to navigate and hard to cancel subscriptions, but we found no gripes with their grapes.

Wine Awesomeness gets a lot of press, but subscribers and reviewers weren’t too impressed with the wines and also reported some serious shipping issues. Bright Cellars ships lackluster wines, their palate quiz is notoriously broken, and their customer service isn’t great. Tasting Room was considered for our trial-sized wine pick, but most reviewers found the wine curation after their taste test to be mediocre.

Our picks were chosen through a mix of personal experience, reviews from industry-leading wine and food sites, and customer reviews from third party sites like TrustPilot.

The Whole Wine World

As the Heat Turns Up, the Reds Cool Down: Your Guide to Drinking Red Wine This Summer
How to Stock Your Wine Rack with 8 Bottles for Every Occasion
How to Navigate Cheap Wine and Score the Perfect Bottle


from Food News – Chowhound https://ift.tt/2Lm0yAR
via IFTTT

No comments:

Post a Comment