Grapevine – Wine Clubs: The Real Deal or a Marketing Ploy?
Have you received snail mail or e-mails espousing the virtues of another “wine club?” Have you been tempted to subscribe to the club based on the expensive, seductive marketing materials or the teaser offers for new subscribers?
Are these clubs the real deal or just another marketing ploy to jump on the bandwagon of wine’s growing popularity and the insatiable desire for consumers to learn everything they can about wine?
It’s difficult to avoid an advertisement or flyer from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or Zagat Surveys as well as a multitude of other corporations with no apparent ties to the wine trade.
This proliferation has confused consumers: “I trust the brand name of the company that is offering wine club offers, but the cost of the wines is too good to be true.” (Remember what our mothers taught us: if it sounds too good to be true…)
Wine clubs are massive operations requiring substantial capital investment and expertise, something the above brands do not have the capability to support. Instead, they’ve followed the new American way of doing business: outsource the operation and receive a fee in return. Ease of entry and ease of exit; a perfect business model–and a nice cash windfall for the struggling media giants.
The bottom line is are the offers good deals? It depends. For simplicity, they are fine and the quality of the wines is never offensive. Why are these offers so appealing and successful? It’s simple Mad Men logic. Promise consumers what they like, make sure the wines are middle of the road, get a credit card on file and make the math simple. Appeal to consumers’ weaknesses, gain their trust and keep shipping wines to them every few months.
As Sade sang: It’s never as good as the first time. The initial offer is always the best offer. Subsequent orders are not as cost effective and you typically have no say in which types of wines will be delivered. You usually have a much better choice, and price, at a reputable local wine shop. The wines that are offered by wine clubs are usually purchased in bulk as second runs (not bad, but not as good as may be hyped). In many cases, if you do find a wine you like, there is a very small window to reorder before the next “great deal” comes along and closes out the first one.
Wines will show up at your door automatically every one to three months and they may be delivered without consideration for weather conditions. Shipping wines to the Eastern seaboard from the West Coast, during the height of the summer or winter months, is always ill advised but not necessarily heeded.
When wine clubs were introduced in the 1990s I experimented with several, but soon dropped them as prices increased and shipping costs surged to $5 to $7 per bottle. I found better offers by supporting my local wine shop, with time-proven, trusted expertise, broader choices and competitive pricing.
The only wine clubs I endorse, from personal experience, are those offered by small wineries, which ship their proprietary wines directly to consumers without any intermediate intervention. When traveling through California wine country, I have become enamored with several individual wineries whose limited production precludes most distributors from offering their selections to retail stores. Their clubs offer me the opportunity to purchase wines I enjoyed in their tasting rooms, at a discount if purchased by the case and with reasonable shipping costs.
If you want to experiment with minimum risk at a great intro price, try one of the major reputable wine clubs. But on a regular basis you can find wines that better suit your preferences and at about the same or lesser cost at your local wine shop.
Nick Antonaccio is a 30-year Pleasantville resident. For over 10 years he has conducted wine tastings and lectures. He is co-host of “Glass Up, Glass Down,” a local cable television series on wine and food; he also offers personalized wine tastings and wine travel services. Nick’s credo: continuous experimenting results in instinctive behavior. You can reach him at nantonaccio@theexaminernews.com or on Twitter @sharingwine.
