Wine Clubs Are Easy to Join

Joining a California wine club

Wine club in St. Helena, CA

If you’re a big fan of California wines, you should definitely join a wine club. You join one by agreeing to buy a certain number of bottles every year, and the club delivers them to you. They may also send information on the wine and what sort of food it’s best paired with. In the most exclusive wine clubs, you get a higher level of membership by agreeing to buy more wine. Joining should be free, and you should be able to cancel at any time, but be sure to read the terms before joining a wine club.

A good wine club will try to find unknown wines that deserve a wider audience and bring them to your attention. Wine clubs are also judged on the number of different club levels and price ranges (in both cases, more is better), shipping frequency, discounts and the number and variety of events held every year.

An exclusive wine club near St. Helena

Anderson’s Conn Valley Vineyards in Napa Valley, a 10-minute drive from downtown St. Helena, has its own wine club. By agreeing to buy six bottles a year in groups of three, you can get Level I membership with discounts on their wines, tickets to parties and invitations to a complimentary tasting. Agreeing to buy 12 bottles a year, or 24, gets you higher levels of membership with even more benefits. Once you’ve chosen a membership level, buying additional bottles won’t count toward your annual allocation.

One wine you might get to try at their wine club is the dark ruby 2008 Right Bank, a classic blend. After a brief period of high wind and heavy rain, Napa Valley experienced a dry, cold spring in 2008. Summer was cool, delaying the ripening of the grapes and making some thinning necessary, so this was not the most abundant vintage. A warm spell in September ripened a lot of varieties of grapes at once — we had to hurry to harvest them all in time. The Right Bank wine from this year has an aroma of mocha, cedar, blackberries and black pepper, with a note of plums as the nose opens up. The wine has a superb texture with a silky finish, and a flavor dominated by black fruit with crushed rocks. This wine is expected to improve for twelve to fifteen years and stay at its peak for ten more.

Anderson’s Conn Valley Vineyards produces world-class wines at affordable prices. The vineyard is a 40-acre estate just south of Howell Mountain, and has been owned and operated by the Anderson family since 1983. Anderson’s wines are sold online and in five locations in Napa Valley, and many other locations nationwide. Join today.