Looking to see what are your favorite winery memberships in the Napa Valley. Please help to provide a few words whether it is their pickup parties, or winery events, or membership discounts that draw your attention to wanting to sign up.
A little background:
I’ve been fortunate enough to have a significant other who has given me the gift of a membership to my choosing, however I can’t decide with all the options, but not even knowing the options is what makes this harder… I love my Napa Reds, the likes of Alpha Omega, Spottswoode, Realm, Mondavi, Merryvale, Myriad, Pride, Outpost… I just don’t know enough about memberships to pick wisely.
Where do you live? If one of the “perks” of membership is attending parties, you need to be able to attend them with some regularity to make it worthwhile.
I would caution, though, that first and foremost you must genuinely like the wine. If you are a wine club member, presumably you will be getting the wine regularly, and thus it will come to occupy a significant proportion of your cellar. So, my advice would be to answer your own question: figure out the wines you like the most, then look at those wineries’ clubs and figure out which one has what you’re looking for (parties/events, access to unreleased or rare bottles, discounts, etc).
Alpha Omega’s ERA Elite is really great, if it is still available. You get great access to their wines, invitations to lots of events, and discounts at partner hotels.
I was happy with the discounts my Merryvale membership provided, and had access to products not in their regular website listing. I also really enjoyed the two times I was in their tasting room.
However, I was disappointed that they stopped offering member discounts on their flagship wines a couple years ago.
This year I suspended my premium reds quarterly shipments so I could spend those dollars on Bordeaux for a change.
Pine Ridge has a solid club (20% discount, free tours/tastings, invites to events) plus if you buy shares of their parent company (Crimson Wine Group) you get an additional discount on purchases (winds up being a total discount of 25%). If you do that you can always justify additional wine purchases as merely contributing to your equity investment returns!