Uncorked Ventures Wine Club

It seems too long since we’ve been here to write, but we’ve been busy.

Of late, we’ve been focusing on California wines for our three wine clubs.  We’ve chosen to focus more and more on California wines over the past few months for a few simple reasons, we’re finding some great wine that is surprisingly available at reasonable prices.

I think the wine market has certainly improved over the past two years, but we’re still seeing quite a few wineries struggling to sell their wine priced at or above $50 per bottle.  That means that there are some great 90+ point wines for sale, which are fitting in well in each of our three wine club tiers.

We’ll update our April wine club shipments here in the coming days since shipments should leave our warehouse early Friday morning.

By Mark Aselstine

We get the question on the phone quite often actually-how does it work when I give one of your wine clubs as a gift?

Unlike many online companies, we want to give you as professional of a setup as possible.  Your gift message is custom printed on a sheet of paper and inserted into the box, to be found once it is opened.  We don’t like the gift message appearing on a packing slip any more than you do!

Really though, when you give a wine club gift you have two separate options.  First, you can prepay for a period of time.  If you choose to prepay for your wine club gift membership then you’ll receive order notifications each and every month showing a $0 order.  We won’t hassle you to extend your gift membership because as you might expect, we don’t like it when companies do that to us.

If you’re paying for a gift membership on an ongoing basis (monthly, every other month or quarterly) you’ll receive all billing information and correspondence.  We don’t contact your gift receiver for credit card problems, cancellations etc. Again, we treat wine gift memberships with a simple rule-if we were customers of a wine club, how would we wish to be treated?

By Mark Aselstine

Thank you for your continued patience-it’s been an interesting and challenging few months for us as we decide here at Uncorked Ventures about how to continue growing our wine clubs and in effect, our wider business.

We appreciate your patience and willingness to share this journey with us over the coming months.  We were happy to feature a series of low production wines this month in our wine clubs, including a 40 case Petite Sirah in our Reserve Selections Wine Club made from the quickly becoming famous Hayne Clone.

We’ll share more information about each of these past shipments over the coming days and hope you’ll consider joining one of our wine clubs in the near future.

By Mark Aselstine

Over the next few days, we’ll take some time to introduce each of our three wine clubs and talk a bit about the differences and specialties of each.

Generally speaking, when we started Uncorked Ventures we had a simple goal in mind-to provide the type of small production, high quality wines that are available here locally in the Bay Area to the entire country.

Matt and I saw a dramatic difference in the type of wine selections which were available in the San Francisco area when compared to San Diego and especially in the Midwest and East Coast when we visited family.  Sure big cities like New York get a ton of great wine, but it’s often the stuff that’s already made a name for itself.  The winemaker private label of 200 cases, that’s still local to wine country.  That’s also the exact wine that most of us want to be able to drink!

We didn’t think high quality wine should be a local thing and frankly speaking, if we were shipping Mondavi and Gallo we wouldn’t be providing much of a service.

In any case, that’s the simple premise for our wine clubs.  High quality wines at a fair price.

By Mark Aselstine

Over the past three years, we’ve worked incredibly hard to grow Uncorked Ventures.  While I won’t bore you with the entire story here, let’s simply say that my business partner is my brother in law Matt and we started Uncorked Ventures simply because we love great wine.  It’s been a ton of fun and a lot of that fun has been seeing the business grow both in terms of the number of customers, but also in the number of offerings.

Part of that growth has been the addition of gift baskets and a few other specialty items, which while they do contain the same wines we ship to our wine club members, we felt that having a space completely dedicated to our wine clubs makes sense.

This site is that place.  As you can tell, it is largely blog style, although over time you’ll see us change the header and other page information to be an exact replica for our regular website uncorkedventures.com.  We don’t want people to be overly confused if they find us for the first time here.

Largely, we just wanted to say hello and that we hope you’ll come back for more information on the wines we’re currently featuring in our three wine club offerings.

By Mark Aselstine