Starting a Wine Club

If you’re someone who enjoys tasting new wine, chatting with likeminded enthusiasts about new wine, and educating yourself on new wines that have come on the market, then a wine club just might be right up your alley. The good news is it doesn’t take much to start one. Here’s our guide to how to successfully begin a wine club.

Finding the Right People

You will need to assemble between 25 to 35 members for your wine club if you want it to be a success. This number can be toyed with depending on the average size of members’ homes—if you begin assembling members and they all have small homes, aim for 25 to 30 members. If most members have big homes, expand the club to include more people. Once you’ve assembled your members (use wine enthusiast bulletin boards on the web to post advertisements, or post one in your local paper), it’s time to assign tasks. A good wine club usually profiles up to six new wines each meeting and serves food (usually good cheese and crackers) at an appointed break period. For each new meeting, you will need to elect someone from within the club to give mini-lectures on the presented wine. These mini-lectures should touch on the flavors, aroma, country of origin, and age of the wine, as well as how it matches the foods being eaten along side it.

How a Club Meeting Should Work

Aim to meet once a month. Assign duties for a particular meeting before the actual meeting is held. You should decide on who should host, who should pick up the wine that’s going to be profiled (and how many bottles of each wine they should pick up—this obviously depends on how many members are in the club), and which members should give lectures on the wines to be presented. Nine times out of ten, the members of a wine club are not experts or restaurant sommeliers—therefore, your members will need to educate themselves on the wines they’ve been elected to present. A good place to find factoids on wine is at the official web site of the American Wine Society. Many of the wines you may purchase will come with factoids, and if they don’t, talk to the salesperson in the spirits shop about the particular bottle, or research the winemaker online when you get home. Wine club meetings usually occur over a time period of two to three hours, with a 30 minute socializing break after the discussion and tasting of the first three bottles of wine. Many wine clubs have its members score (using pencils and paper) the wines being sampled on a scale of 0 to 20. This is done to prevent extended dialogue from breaking out over one particular wine (which can hold the meeting up). Once an elected member calculates scores, that member writes up the tallies for inclusion in your wine club newsletter, which should be sent out to members sometime shortly after the meeting.

The Costs of a Wine Club

Wine—as we all know—can be expensive, and you should not think of skimping when picking out a selection of wines for your club’s meeting (most people do not join a wine club to sample cheap table wine that costs six bucks a bottle). Aim to keep your per-bottle costs at $20 to $40 a bottle. Have whichever person is presenting for the upcoming meeting purchase all bottles on a credit card, and then have that person tally up the total cost of the wine. Divide the total cost of the wine by the number of members in the club, then alert club members to the amount of money they should write checks out for.

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