Wine Clubbing

The hubs and I belong to a wine club which is now in its fourth year and I always get a lot of requests on how to go about setting a wine club so I thought it was time to jot my advice down! As with most clubs it started with four individuals who wanted to learn more about wine versus the regular ‘let’s down a bottle sessions’ and since I had just started a job marketing wine at the time I thought I should check out what my friend was talking about. So there we were, three couples gathering over food and wine every other month. We’ve since grown and have about 20 people in the group ( always need new blood!) and on average about 10 to 12 participants turn out for each session. It’s always a night of learning, catching up and of course a bit of debauchery.

For a wine club to be on goinging you always need a ring leader or two who will initiate that first email to set up a date for everyone to congregate, failing which you can easily go five or six months without meeting up. What was a waste of missed wines! Our group finds doodle to be the best way to choose a date. The initiator throws out a couple dates and everyone fills out their availability and the date that works best for the majority is chosen. One of the participants then volunteer to host and someone throws out a theme. Voila! It’s all set up. The host supplies wine glasses and a table where everyone can sit around and dig into the food. We always choose a Friday or Saturday to meet and start at about 7 p.m and go on till about midnight.

We found that we needed some structure to our wine club and over time the following rules have come to be.

• Everyone brings ONE bottle of wine pertaining to the theme. We have decided on a price range of about $15 to $25. You might want to start with a fairly simple theme like white wines from Argentina or a comparative tasting of Cabernet Sauvignons from different countries. The goal is to start exploring the wines and learning about them so that you are able to identify what you like and also find new varietals you like. Starting with a varietal (type of grape), a vintage (year) or an appellation (region) is always a good idea. From there as your wine club grows you can start doing more complex themes like 2010 Eastern European Pinot Noirs .

An ex roomate gave a me a wine tasting kit (click here to see the one I had, she bought it for me from a Homesense store) and this was very helpful during the infant stages of our wine club. There was a book that outlined the various elements in a wine and helped us nose the wine and increased our vino vocabulary. Decanter has a pretty decent online version (click here) but we really liked the tactile aspect of being able to flip through the pocket size book, the bags to cover the wine bottles and the little cheat sheets.

As our wine club grows, so have we… we’ve seen weddings and babies come to be and our themes are starting to get a bit more complex. Recently we got our hands on some vintage wines from the LCBOs wine auction (click here to read about a wine auction I attended at the Canadian Opera) and did a horizontal (same vintage) and vertical (different vintages but same winery or region) tasting of French wines. For this two part edition we pooled in the money and one couple went and bid on the wines. Something the hubs and I do quite often is pick up wine on our many travels, age them for a couple years and then pull them out for wine club. This has helped us  identify what we should age and for how long.

At the end of the day, the goal is to have fun, enjoy some great wines and meet up with some fun people. Our wine club now has members who I might have not met on my own, the initial group of friends keep bringing in new people and some gel well and some never come back. But hey! That’s okay too!

I’d love to hear about your wine exploration and if you belong to a club.. any tips or ideas to share?

Cheers!