Wine by subscription: how services from Berlin to Singapore work

When my sister and I were little, our parents gave us a beautiful colorful box with cut-out windows of different shapes and sizes for New Year's Eve. The box traditionally contained 31 chocolate figures - one for each day of January. However, by a mysterious coincidence, the chocolate ran out much sooner than February.

Modern Christmas Advent calendars hide miniature perfumes, spices, teas, toys, creative tasks and more. There are options for wine connoisseurs, too, and what's especially nice is that they're available year-round, not just for the holidays.

Wine clubs and subscriptions can be just that "grown-up version" of an Advent calendar, only in a more relaxed format: you don't open a window each day, but get an expected package that arrives at a certain frequency.

The idea of a wine subscription is not new, but in recent years it has evolved into quite a mass format. Previously, wine clubs were often local, linked to specific wineries or wine libraries. Now, however, the model is global: choose your style, your region, the regularity of your parcels and get them delivered straight to your home.

The idea of such clubs originated long before the fashion for subscription services. The oldest wine club in the United States, the Wine of the Month Club, appeared in California in 1972. Its creator, Paul Kalemkiarian, first simply brought his customers two bottles a month, one local and one from another region, and then a whole business grew out of this idea.

The world has changed a lot since then: the internet, convenient logistics, and the development of online commerce have made their mark. Today, the wine subscription market is valued at about $12.4 billion, and Future Market Insights predicts that it will grow at about 10% per year for the next 10 years. That's quite a lot, especially when you remember that wine is still a pretty conservative category. People clearly like the idea of not having to spend time and effort choosing - carefully selected wines are brought to their home, and even neatly packaged.

Wineries have also played their part in popularizing such subscriptions and clubs. The Italian winery Montemaggio, for example, offers its wine club members several parcels a year, access to library vintages and private tastings. In Austria, Döllerer has its own Handpicked by Döllerer subscription: several parcels a year with a pre-fixed price and wines personally selected by the house team.

The mechanics of most services are similar. First, you answer a few simple questions: whether you like red or white, how comfortable you are with high acidity, how you feel about sweet wines, whether you are ready to experiment or whether you prefer classic regions and varieties.

On the basis of this profile, the service selects wines according to your preferences, and you receive a cherished parcel according to the chosen frequency: monthly, every two months, once a quarter. The number of bottles can also be chosen, it all depends on your wine appetite.

After that, a team of sommeliers and buyers comes into play. The Wine of the Month Club, for example, evaluates several hundred samples each month, and only about a dozen wines that have passed the quality and price tests make it to the final set.

In more modern subscriptions, the principle is similar, but the focus is shifted towards certain niches: rare regions, family farms, biodynamics and so on. The bottles are almost always accompanied by cards with descriptions: the history of the winery, the specifics of the harvest, the grapes, tips on serving temperatures and gastronomic combinations.

The Brad's Wine club is quite prominent in Europe. It's an Anglo-German project based in Berlin and operates across Europe. Subscription prices start at €58 a month for six bottles with free EU shipping, and the box includes white, rosé and red wines as well as tasting notes, a recipe and a small gift. I really liked the emphasis there on wines from small family farms rather than the mass segment. It's like if, instead of a set of standard chocolates, you got handmade candy from a small patisserie that you yourself would be unlikely to find.

Another interesting European example is the Sublime Wine project. It is a club and online store that emphasizes honest, responsibly produced wines from Europe. The service allows you to subscribe to three or six bottles per month. Subscriptions start at €75. The wines are selected by an experienced sommelier, and the kit includes tasting notes and food recommendations. Subscribers enjoy discounts on in-store purchases and free shipping for large sets within Germany. This is a good example of how a club is evolving into a community around a particular style.

For natural wine lovers, there is the Plain Wine Club. A subscription costs €55 a month - you get three bottles of wine from three different winemakers and a small booklet describing each wine and the winery's history. The subscription can be paused or canceled at any time. In Berlin there is another example of such a niche - the SIPS service, which collects sets of natural wines without unnecessary marketing, only those that the team itself is particularly passionate about, plus rare and limited items. The client in this case buys not so much a label as trust in the taste of specific people.

There is a club in France called SomMailier. It was founded by Bordeaux native Laurent Jung and his wife Alice. Their idea is simple: every three months you are sent three or six bottles of French wines, which are very difficult to find in ordinary retail. Subscriptions cost from €111. Everything is designed for the gift format: beautiful boxes, detailed stories about the regions, ready-made tasting sets.

Singapore's Wala Club is an extension of The French Cellar, one of the first online clubs in all of Asia that specialized in French wines. Today, Wala offers a monthly subscription for two bottles of wine or sake (for S$98, or $75). There are additional options for members, like visits to wineries and access to rare aged wines.

Not all wine subscriptions are limited to just delivering wine at selected intervals. There are also more playful formats that are particularly reminiscent of the Advent calendar. The American service Vinebox from San Francisco does a subscription by the glass. The customer is sent a cute set of several wine vials of one hundred milliliters each. The themes change from month to month. The kit comes with sommelier videos, notes, and appetizer recommendations. This is perfect for those who love the tasting process itself and want to try many different wines, but aren't ready to open a whole bottle every time.

As a result, such a subscription is an ideal gift for a connoisseur of good wines. It is an opportunity to try different and new wines, a surprise, and an opportunity to have a little holiday from time to time.

Also, you are not required to be a wine pro or guess what kind of wine a person likes - the professionals will do it for you.

Personally, I will definitely not refuse such a gift, because if you remember that box of chocolates from my childhood, the main thing in it was not the content, but the surprise, attention and a sense of celebration.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor