Wine Clubs That Send You Bottles You've Never Heard Of

If you want a club that sends bottles you cannot pronounce, the honest answer is that only one of the big three is really built for it: Naked Wines. Wine.com is better if you would rather hunt than be sent. Firstleaf works only if you train it.

Most wine clubs are a convenience dressed up as a discovery. They send the same dependable Cabernet and buttery Chardonnay everyone already drinks, charge a premium for the cardboard, and call it a journey. If you came here for that, you do not need me.

This is for the other kind of drinker. The one who orders the bottle on the list they cannot pronounce. The one who would rather be wrong about something interesting than right about something dull.

There are three worth the standing order, and they earn it in completely different ways.

Naked Wines — the one most likely to surprise you

Naked Wines is less a club than a patronage scheme, and that is the appeal. Your monthly deposit becomes credit, and that credit funds independent winemakers to make wine sold only to members. You are, in a small way, a backer rather than a customer.

For anyone who roots for the underdog, that model is the whole point. Independent growers working unfashionable grapes are exactly the people the mainstream market starves. This is a way to feed them.

The catch: the model does the selecting, and it selects for winemakers, not for grapes. A funded winemaker in California is still likely to make you a Cabernet. You will get small-production wine from people worth backing, which is not the same promise as a box of varieties you have never met. Some months it is both. Some months it is a very good Chardonnay.

Wine.com — the one for hunting rather than being sent

Wine.com is not a club so much as the largest serious wine shop in the country with a membership bolted on. If your problem is selection, if you want to actually find a bottle of Xinomavro or Sercial rather than hope a box contains one, this is where you go hunting.

Their StewardShip membership, about $69 a year for unlimited free shipping, pays for itself if you order with any regularity.

The catch: it does nothing for you. A subscription box makes a decision on your behalf; this makes decisions cheaper to act on. If the reason you want a club is that you are tired of choosing, this is the wrong product. It is also the one I use most.

Disclosure: some links here are affiliate links — if you buy through them I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Learn more You must be 21+ to buy alcohol in the United States.Wine.com is the seller: they take the payment, ship the bottle and handle returns, and what's available depends on the state you pick at checkout. I never see your order.

Browse the underdogs on Wine.com →

Firstleaf — the one that only works if you work it

Firstleaf is the club for people who want the algorithm to do the homework. You rate what you are sent, it adjusts, and the boxes sharpen over time. The intro offer, usually six bottles for around $44.95 with free shipping, is the loss-leader that gets everyone in the door. Recurring boxes settle higher.

What makes it worth a look for an underdog drinker is not the famous grapes. It is that a learning club will, if you train it honestly, start handing you the lesser-known bottles you keep rating well. Reward the obscure and it feeds you more of it.

The catch: it starts from the middle of the road and moves slowly. Expect two or three boxes of pleasant, safe wine before your ratings pull it anywhere interesting, and expect it to drift back if you ever rate a crowd-pleaser highly out of politeness. It is an algorithm, and it believes you.

How to actually choose

Three drinkers, three answers.

Want your money to mean something, and to back small producers the market overlooks? Naked Wines.

Want to chase a specific obscure bottle and actually find it? Wine.com.

Want to hand over the wheel and let a club widen your palate over a year? Firstleaf, rated honestly.

There is a Churchillian line about democracy being the worst system except for all the others. Wine clubs are a little like that: every one is a compromise, and the trick is choosing the compromise that matches the drinker you actually are.

What none of them do

Here is the gap, and I would rather name it than pretend it is not there. Not one of these clubs will teach you the grape. A bottle turns up, you drink it, you like it or you do not, and unless you go looking afterwards you learn nothing you can use next time. The box is a delivery mechanism, not an education.

That is the part we built the Cellar Club for, and it is worth being precise about what it is: a membership, not a shipment. It does not send you wine. It sends you one underdog a week with a real tasting walkthrough and a verified place to buy it, turns the Underdog 101 into a guided path through the hundred grapes worth knowing, and tells you when a wine you saved is back in stock. It is designed to sit alongside a shipping club, not to replace one.

If you join one of the three above, do the thing the boxes will not do for you: keep notes, and rate what you drink. The point of a club is not the bottle that arrives Tuesday. It is the map of your own taste it draws over a year.

Start cheaper than a subscription

A club is a standing commitment. If you are not ready for one, the Underdog Starter List does the same job for nothing: ten bottles under $25 worth chasing, sent as a short email, each one a grape most people have never been offered. It is the least expensive way to find out whether you actually like being surprised.

If you already know you do, work through the famous-label swaps in Order This Instead and buy the alternatives directly. No subscription required, and you keep the choosing.

— Chris Berry