Wine Buying
Monday, September 26th, 2011
Type of Wine Clubs
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Wine Buying Clubs
I was in a strictly buying club when I was stationed in New York City back in the 70's. My extremely smart neighbor (he went on to become the Commanding General of a major Army Command) started a Wine Buying Club. It worked like this. He got ten of us wine lovers together, collected say $100 each and he then went shopping at several small local liquor stores in Queens. He would cut deals with them to buy twelve to twenty-four cases of wine at a time at deep discounts. When the wine was delivered we would get together and each take a some of this and some of that to create our share and then we could just enjoy our wine without paying anything close to retail or even the best sale prices.
Other types of Buying Clubs include Wine of the Month Clubs, Regional Wine Clubs, etc. It is important to note here that a wine buying club is not like shopping for a bottle of wine. In most cases you cannot pick the specific bottle you want every single month. I was a long time member of the Virginia Wine of the Month Club and every month they sent me two bottles of wine (a white and a red generally) from a Virginia vineyard. This allowed you to sample and taste many different wines. One of the benefits of membership was that the vineyards would agree to sell their wine at a discount through the club for a set period or until an agreed upon quantity of wine was purchased. This is a prime example of combination of a wine tasting and wine buying club. To me the advantages are on the tasting side as the discounts while adequate were not spectacular and I could always meet or beat them at local stores.
Wine Tasting Clubs
Wine tasting clubs are geared toward individuals who are interested in trying new and different wines and or want to learn more about wine. These clubs can have many different characteristics. They can be centered on groups of individuals with common interests like same neighborhood or community, same company or organization or same social group (country club, charity veterans, or retirees) for example. They can also be commercially centered like the wine tasting clubs formed by a local gourmet restaurant who invites customers to periodic wine tasting dinners. There are several advantages to these clubs; cost savings, social interaction, and education are just the most obvious. You can either form your own club or join an existing club what ever floats your boat. Actual meeting frequency can be what ever the group wants and the format can be very simple as in just a wine and cheese event or very complex centered on a multi-course dinner with a different wine for each course. Obviously the expense and format need to be considered when joining or forming a club. One that we found fun and very inexpensive was a club whose method was touring four to five vineyards on a Saturday, just remember that in doing that you are going out drinking so I suggest a van and driver.
One of the most memorable wine tasting I ever attended was at a great restaurant in Leesburg, Virginia called Tuscarora Mill owned by a great restaurateur Kevin Malone. Kevin had arranged for John Parducci, the then current head of the Parducci vineyards in Mendocino County, Califorina to be at the dinner to present his wines. He was such an interesting man, a true lover of his wine making craft and his wine, the evening flew by. One of the wines he presented was an after dinner wine that he made in an effort to help other local vineyards out of an over abundant grape harvest. By the time the purchased harvested the grapes were delivered to him the grapes were so full of sugar he was convinced he would never succeed in making a drinkable wine. The result was a wine he named Chateau MarJon (after his wife Marjorie and himself). It was so good I order a case and had it shipped back to Virginia and I dislike sweet after dinner wines.
About the Author
About the Author:
Tom King is a retired Army Engineer Officer, author, wine lover, former head hunter and avid golfer who currently works part time as a Starter/Player Assistant at the Reunion Resort & Club in Reunion, Florida. He also has numerous websites he maintains one a golf resource blog at Tees 2 Greens, a several other websites at King-Holdings.com on golf, his second favorite subject Food & Wine and he is also just getting started on his article database!! Please feel free to visit any or all of them
Andrea Immer Robinson Wine Buying Guide Justaddfood.com
|
|
Milwaukee Instruments PH600AQ Ph Tester With 1 Point Manual Calibration $15.99 pH range: 0.0 to 14.0 pH, with one point manual calibration and accuracy of_+ 0.2 pH. Battery Life: 700 hours. Calibration solution sold separately. 30 day warranty.... |
|
|
3 Piece Plastic Airlock (Sold in sets of 3) $2.45 3-piece plastic airlock with a snap-on vented cover. This airlock is easily cleaned and easy to use. Fill the airlock halfway up with your sanitizer and stick in the drilled rubber stopper. Be sure to see the other products offered by Learn To Brew LLC.... |
|
|
Wine Bottle Cork Cage is a Great Place to Save Your Favorite Corks 91-035 $19.00 A fun and innovative way to keep and cherish all of your wonderful wine memories. Just drop your treasured corks in the top. Artfully sculpted metal work with colored glass spheres. Reverse side depicts a grape image in metal. Bottom hinges open to release corks. *Patent Pending... |
|
|
The Essential Neil Diamond $10.94 Neil Diamond is one of a rare breed. As a songwriter, his music has been covered successfully by artists as diverse as the Monkees, Deep Purple, UB40, and Smash Mouth. But Diamond used that three-chord alchemy to build an unparalleled career as a performer as well. The 38 tracks on these two discs address those interlocking legacies in the most comprehensive manner yet, gathering his material from... |
|
|
DMT Crystal Saver- Diamond File $19.20 A little chip in a crystal wine glass is no reason to throw it in the garbage. For a small investment, this Crystal Saver file fixes those sharp points and saves plenty of money in replacement costs. The 4-inch-long, half-round file is coated with a coarse grit of diamonds, one of the hardest known materials. As such, this file is hard enough to repair any delicate material, including other glassw... |
