Uncorked Ventures Wine Club

It might seem strange that we’d take the time to highlight another new wine club which sprung up, but realistically we don’t feel like these major media backed clubs (such as the New York Times Wine Club, Sunset Magazine’s Wine Club or even the Wall Street Journal Wine Club) are major competitors to us.

Sure, they’re bigger.  Sure, their marketing budget’s dwarf ours.

They aren’t dealing in the same prices points, nor are they appealing to wine drinker’s who are looking for something unique.

Evidently, the Washington Post is now joining the wine club game. Welcome to the party guys, best of luck and we hope that whoever you chose to run your wine club for you (since none of the major media players have anything to do with choosing wine or interacting with customers) does an outstanding job!

We’ve mentioned before, but we’re incredibly happy to be considered the top 90 point wine club out there-every single bottle we ship is either rated at 90+ points by well known wine critics, or it is made in such small quantities that no scores are available-but the quality it there in our opinion.

We get a fair number of questions on that second part, about our opinion and how we decide.  Sure, some people consider it a cop out on some level, but I thought I’d share a good example about why we want that leeway.

We shipped a bottle this month to our Special Selection Wine Club members called Stone the Crows.  It’s a new Napa Valley project, but the wine is being made by Thomas Rivers Brown, perhaps the most famous winemaker on the planet.  With multiple 100 point scores from Wine Advocate at multiple wineries, he is also the most sought after winemaker around as well.  We shared some more information about Stone the Crows on our Blog if you’re interested-but when we started talking about including the wine there were not any critics scores to back up our thoughts, that it might be the most impressive bottle we’ve sourced all year.

Now, 92 points from Parker and 94 points from Wine Enthusiast came out and the wine is very quickly sold out.  If we would have waited for the critics to catch up and publish, we wouldn’t have been able to share this memorable Cabernet Sauvignon with our customers.

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