Best Wine Clubs for 2023: Winc, Vinebox, Firstleaf and More

Formerly known as Club W, Winc first asks customers to take a short quiz and then presents dozens of good wine choices and four highlighted recommendations that should match your palate for a monthly subscription. If you already know your wine preference, you can choose which wines to add to your box and use the site’s filter options to find sweet wine, sparkling wine, international wine like French wine and vegan wines (yes, that’s a thing).

You don’t have to pick four wines, but it’s generally the easiest way to get to the free shipping minimum. If you don’t curate your box or forget to skip the month, your top recommendations will be shipped to you. Winc also sells both its own wines and bottles from independent wineries. 

At $13 per bottle and up, Winc provides an overall great value for the wines and a user-friendly website. As a wine club member, you’ll also receive a credit toward your next purchase for any wine you don’t enjoy. Plus, you can rate the wines (between one and five stars), which improves your future recommendations and helps others make decisions.

You can skip your next delivery if you’ll be out of town, but you cannot pause your subscription if you need a longer break. Introverts should know that you need to cancel via phone or online chat (the latter being the fastest way).

Novices and connoisseurs alike can build lasting brand loyalty with Winc’s wine selection, but be warned: some wine club subscribers might get tired of its stock in a few months if they want something different with each delivery. Either way, we think there’s something for everyone in this popular wine subscription.

First Leaf

I tried this wine club and have to say the hit rate of solid wines was extremely high for my moderately experienced palate. If you’ve graduated from the Gallos and the Cupcakes and want to include more nuanced, complex and higher-priced premium wine in your life, Firstleaf wine club might be good for you too. Its palate quiz is one of the most involved, asking for varietal (pinot noir vs. shiraz, for instance) preferences in addition to using several household name wines as taste benchmarks. 

This intelligent wine subscription service gets to know you by asking about certain tasting notes and qualities you might prefer in your perfect wine — such as minerality — in contrast to similar quizzes which assume many don’t know what that means. In short, this is probably the best wine club for a wine enthusiast who has the basics down and is ready to launch into expert wine tasting territory.

Firstleaf offers six tailored bottles of wine delivered per month for $90. You can schedule the delivery frequency however you please (according to the company, most customers pick an every other month schedule), and can swap out each of your selections through your account, but if you don’t like the replacement, you’ll have to email customer support. Otherwise, skipping a single order, putting your account on hold, reactivating it, and canceling your subscription altogether can all be done through your online wine club account.

Cellars Wine Club ($29 and up per month) actually offers four different wine clubs that you can switch between, based on your preferences. A wine expert sommelier team tastes and chooses the curated wines for the clubs every month. Ultimately, these sommelier experts pull from the same pool of wines, but the individual sub-clubs cater to specific tastes and categories. 

Most of these sub-clubs ship a wine box with two wine bottles per month. Clubs are curated by themes like 90+ point wines, sparkling wines and even a sweet wine club. While other services, especially palate-based ones, box you into experiencing certain kinds of wine, Cellars allows the wine drinker to be adventurous from wine shipment to wine shipment without compromising quality.

Switching between clubs can be done online through your account, but if you want to cancel your subscription, you have to reach out to customer service.

Vinebox

Vinebox is a great way to try high-end wines from around the globe in its many tasting boxes available for purchase. 

The cool and very giftable twist-top vials hit the middle ground between a tasting pour and a standard glass pour. This way, you can try these wines and maybe even have enough to pair with a meal or just unwind at the end of the day. 

Their Box of the Month starts at $79 (but is now on sale for $62.30) and includes six 100ml vials of wine. You can also choose a single purchase of their boxes and go up from there.

SomMailer

For Francophiles, this wine club seeks to replicate the sommelier in a fine French restaurant or wine bar but from the comfort of your home. For one, all the wines come from France, but the team selecting them also lives and works in French wine regions and thus are intimately acquainted with the nuance of the product. To further drill down on the sommelier experience, SomMailer includes thoughtful food pairings and in-depth descriptions with every bottle. 

To sign up for SomMailer, you’ll choose either three bottles ($110 per shipment), six bottles ($209) or 12 bottles ($400) to be delivered quarterly and then select all red wine, all white wine or a mix of both. Subscriptions to SomMailer can be canceled anytime, but if you want to just try one box or gift a box of three or six French wines to a friend, you can do that too.

The best part is if you find a wine you really love, SomMailer will sell you a case of either three, six, or 12 bottles a la cart. This is great because you may not be able to find every wine you try in your local package store. 

The popularity of biodynamic wines aligns with a growing desire to consume more natural foods and this organic wine club has its finger on the pulse of that shift in preferences. Organic grapes are a great place to start, but biodynamic farming and processing doesn’t deteriorate the soil or add traditional winemaking additives like artificial sugars to natural wine.

Plonk Wine Club pulls biodynamic wines from all corners of the globe. As with everything else that’s organic, this is a pricey box ($110 per month) that only contains four bottles. You can also order six or a dozen at a discount, but instead of getting an additional eight unique wines, you’ll be stocking up on three bottles of each of that month’s picks.

Roscioli Wine Club

For those partial to old-world wine, Roscioli curates a selection of Italian bottles for decidedly discerning palates. The Roscioli family has been a fixture in Italy’s food, wine and hospitality scene for two centuries. More recently, they’ve bottled up all that knowledge into a high-end wine club for serious imbibers and collectors alike. 

Members of this wine club will receive two 12-bottle shipments per year (24 total) of Italian and old-world wines with an emphasis on biodiversity and biodynamics. Roscioli offers three subscription tiers starting at $438 per year for the “Italian Wine Club 1” or “Italian Wine Club 2” for $593 a year. Join the exclusive Collector Clubs (currently on a waitlist), and this club will run you $1,100 to $2,200 per year (prices vary depending on the selection) for 24 special wines. 

Roscioli Wine Club ships nationwide in the US, and each shipment includes pairing suggestions and scannable QR codes that trigger video introductions to the winemaker. Membership also includes access to Roscioli’s online community platform of wine courses and a portal where they can ask anything (well, anything wine-related) of an Italian winemaker or sommelier. 

The best part? Club members can cash in on a complimentary wine tasting at Roscioli when visiting Rome.

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A vegan wine club? Now we’ve heard it all. Knowing whether or not a wine is vegan at your local wine shop is nearly impossible, and you often need to do some sleuthing if you want to ensure it is. Not so with this vegan wine club, which aims to take that winemaker research off your plate and fill your glass with quality wine every month.

Subscriptions start at $90 per month for three wines but for $90 you can choose or gift a starter box that includes three premium bottles of vegan wine. If you do know what you want, simply subscribe to either Red Lovers, Light Lovers or Signature Club. The three wine clubs ship six wines per quarter from international vegan wineries, and you can add vegan cheese pairings from Miyoko’s Creamery. You can also change what kind of box you receive every month. In order to change your subscription type or cancel it, you need to email their team before your next shipment.

Maybe wine isn’t your drink of choice, but it’s always nice to have a few great wine bottles around. Ninety Plus Cellars ships rebranded wines from reputable wineries every three months. Meaning, they purchase a small percentage of bottles from vineyards with histories of highly rated wines and repackage them.

Starting at $95 per quarter, you’ll get the six best wines of the season, six reds or a mix of six reds, whites and the occasional rosé and bubbly wines. It recently added a three-bottle option that features a mix of red, white, and the occasional sparkling or rosè, in case you want to stock up for a party or the holiday season. Some of the older, legacy wine club companies still do four shipments a year, but we think Ninety Plus offers a better value and has a more user-friendly website.

Wine Insiders

Simple to use and straightforward, if you’re looking for the convenience and discount associated with wine delivery but not the commitment of a full subscription service, you might try Wine Insiders. The wine delivery service offers wine lovers a careful selection of wines including reds, whites, sparkling wine and rosés all under $20 with zero subscription or monthly commitment and free shipping on six bottles or more. 

It depends. In my neighborhood of New York, wine is exceptionally expensive to buy in package stores and so I find I can find the best wine for the best prices when I purchase it online. Some of the most popular services including Winc and Firstleaf have excellent plans that will deliver great bottles for as little as $13 each. I can almost never find decent wine that cheap in my local shops and so buying wine online is cheaper. 

Generally speaking, no. We haven’t yet subscribed to every wine club, but the bulk of the ones we have tried make it fairly easy to cancel your subscription at no cost. Just be careful to read the details and fine print before you sign up. Some services will have options to commit to three or six months in advance and in those cases, it may be harder to cancel until your commitment is through.

You may want to start by asking yourself a few questions that go beyond red or white, flat or sparkling. Do you want a wine service that is highly curated to your specific tastes and favorite wine types? Do you have a roster of usual wines or would you rather try (mostly) new wine? Perhaps you’d like a master sommelier sharing their tasting notes and opinions of certain bottles? Are you looking for premium fine wine or a bottle of some other artisanal specialties? Then there are vegan wines, naked wines, organic and biodynamic wines to consider, each with a niche wine club or two specializing in them. Most importantly you must decide what a high-quality bottle of wine should cost. From there, you can use our list to find the best wine club or subscription service for you.