It always amazes us how, in this day of super-targeted marketing, most wine clubs still take a shotgun approach to selling wine.  “Sign up for $__ and we’ll send you 6 bottles of delicious wine every month.”  Of course the wine is chosen by their “experts” so you’re sure to like it.  Not.

A lot of wineries are the same way.  Instead of tracking which wines you actually buy from them, you get the same wines that your neighbor or the member in Peoria gets. And it’s no secret wineries use this medium to get rid of their slow sellers; you get two bottles of what you want and two of something you may not care about.

But the times are achangin’, at least with third party wine clubs, as they develop more sophisticated technology to pinpoint customers’ flavor profiles.  Now instead of joining a club that sends out California wines of every stripe, for instance, you can specify subsets within the club, like aged cabernets. And it should only get better as technology allows clubs to drill down on—and remember—exactly what you like to drink.

WineClubReviews is a handy website you can check out to find out about wine clubs and what they offer.  The owners of the site have done a lot of the grunt work in vetting wine clubs and rate the clubs based on specific metrics, such as QPR (Quality-to-Price Ratio), degrees of customization, and return policies.