Discount Wine Clubs

Enjoy Great Wines on a Budget...
Via Discount Wine Clubs

It could be said that good wines, especially good foreign wines, are usually overpriced at your local retail store. There are simply too many intermediaries in the process that gets the wine from the winery to the store's crowded shelves.

Discount wine clubs, being mainly online operations, are in a way a result of this state of affairs.

A discount club basically negotiates a good bulk price with wineries, eliminating the costs inherent to retail sales. But, the resulting benefits for wine club members are not limited to cost reduction; the clubs are also a way to buy wine that has been certified as being good quality by a team of experts. :-)

Big Wine Club, Low Price

In a way, all online wine clubs are discount wine clubs, inasmuch as they all aim at offering wine at competitive prices. However, it is the larger corporation-owned wine clubs that can usually offer the biggest bargains. Bigger companies have more to negotiate with, and, naturally, buying large quantities also gets them the best price.

In this category, you'll find a great wine club with highly competitive prices starting at $15 a bottle, namely, Cellars Wine Club

At a lower quality level, the American Cellars Wine Club has offers starting as low as $12 per bottle.

And somewhere in the middle, as far as quality of service goes, the Four Seasons Wine Club also carries similar bargains.

In the UK, the top-rated Wine Society offers bottles starting as low as £4.50.

Quality Above All

However tempting the price lists may seem, when you sign up for a wine club, you should never lose sight of the most important aspect: the wines' quality.

There are bad and cheap wines with fancy names being produced all over the world even as I am writing this... and yet there is really nothing in a beautiful tag or fine-looking bottle that can guarantee the quality of the wine inside it.

When joining one of the discount wine clubs, the most important thing you need to have is trust. As much as there is bad cheap wine and bad expensive wine, there are thousands of wineries around the world that are producing great affordable wines everyday.

You need to trust your wine club to have the skill to find these wines and bring them to you. It is a difficult task, but not impossible, as it has been proved over and over again. :-)

Reputation and Reviews...

My advice is that you check out your prospective wine club's online reputation first. You should read expert reviews and customer reviews (not just ads) about the wine club...

...and the best place to do this is here at Wine-Club-Selector.com. Just choose your region of interest in the menu on the left and go from there!

Then, you can also look at the wine club's past wine selections and check out both the wines' prices elsewhere and what consumers said about the wines. For this kind of wine-specific information, you can turn to one of the main wine publications such as Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast, or (a personal favorite and also a free service) snooth.com.

Then, once you are satisfied with the results of your little research, you will be ready for a life of great wines at small prices.