Non-Winery Wine Clubs: Yay or Nay?

As an all-around wine fan and club member at several places in WA state, I love the exclusivity of being a winery club member. There isn’t one place I have tasted at that doesn’t have their own wine club of sorts and usually different tiers of membership ranging in the number of bottles you need to purchase and how often. Some clubs offer exclusive events and member appreciation parties, while some are strictly to obtain higher end wines that are not sold commercially. Whatever your reason for initially joining a club, it is always costly and committing you to purchasing semi-expensive to costly wines. When visiting Napa a few years ago, my wife and I found some amazing wineries that offered incredible bottles but only to their members (another sad truth of winery tastings; you get the good stuff that isn’t available anywhere else). This of course prompts you to sign up for membership and agree to several hundred-dollar acquisitions, several times a year. While the wine is top notch and “exclusive”, it’s still not for the financially strained and most importantly, if you aren’t local to the winery, you miss out on the on-premises perks. Most wine clubs come with free tastings per month, or member only events, but if you subscribe to a club in California and live in New York, odds are you won’t be making most of those and are now only paying for wine to be shipped cross country.

              However, I have found several establishments lately that offer wine club memberships, but they aren’t a winery, but rather a wine store or wine bar. These places offer curations of several bottles from a specific region or varietal, usually with food pairings or recipes included, but they aren’t wines owned or made by the store. This raises an interesting question; are these non-winery club memberships worth the price? There are of course local benefits that come with these memberships, to include exclusive tastings or parties, but again, these wines usually aren’t the “high-end”, winery only bottles found at the winery itself, but rather things that can be purchased in wine shops or online retailers. Granted, there is an occasional shop or restaurant that makes friends with winemakers and may carry a special label not commercially sold, but for the most part this isn’t the case. I have been to a few states now with these types of stores and wine clubs offered but never really know what to make of it. I think there is definitely value in getting a monthly/quarterly collection of wine, selected from different wineries and the ability to sample new bottles or varietals you might not have had, but you can walk through a Total Wine and More and essentially do the same thing, often with case sales and other rewards in store.

So what do you think? Are non-winery memberships an easy sell or a hard pass? If you weren’t/aren’t a member at a specific winery, or live in a part of the country where Vineyards are not close by, what would you want in a wine store/bar driven club?