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

We saw a company offering a weekly wine club the other day, I guess getting out a monthly wine club wasn’t fun enough for them so they upped the ante right?  A monthly wine club can be a shipping and logistical challenge, depending on your wine company.  One of the major issues for us is that we tend to buy wine in the days and weeks before it is shipped.  Now, if we had a major newspaper behind us things might be different-of course we’d then be stuck shipping inferior wine though!

In any case there is one simple question I wish everyone would ask their wine club before joining-what did you ship last month?  It is a simple and straight forward question, but also one which should receive a simple answer.  We don’t necessarily ship every single person in any of our wine clubs exactly the same wine (after all, if someone were to offer us a single case of the best value wine or simply the best wine that we’d ever tasted we wouldn’t turn it down) but we can definitely give you a good idea about what you should expect to receive as one of our wine club members.

By Mark Aselstine

Matt and I had the following to say on our Special Selections Wine Club newsletter:

We didn’t set out to send a Pinot Noir only shipment this month, but we felt strongly about the Chloe Creek Vineyard wine and the opportunity after over two years of trying, to work with Keefer Ranch on their vineyard designate estate Pinot was too good to pass up.  We hope these wines combine to help show off the dramatic differences that winemaking choices and vineyard choices can create in Sonoma Pinot Noir.

When we tell friends, family and neighbors about what we do, we often get something of a confused look.  As it turns out, people think that finding high quality wines is incredibly easy.  It really isn’t and finding wine which we are comfortable shipping to our wine club members is a continual challenge.  There is a ton of made to be sure, but frankly when you start getting into this $40+ price point-not all of it seems like a good value when you taste it.  Sure, a $40 wine is more likely to be good than a $10 wine- but at this price point we need to start seeing an experience when you open a bottle.  In this wine club shipment for our Special Selections wine club we thought both Pinot Noir choices offered something different and unique for Pinot Noir in California.  They are both higher acidity Pinot Noir’s, which makes for a nice and interesting accompaniment to your favorite fish or chicken dish.

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