What 13 years of reviewing wine clubs taught us about making wine

Quick credentials, since they're relevant. Since 2012, I've been reviewing wine-of-the-month clubs at wineclubgroup.com with a longtime tasting partner. Hundreds of shipments. Thousands of bottles. Every major club, most of the small ones, and a depressing number of the bad ones.

We started Backup Wine four years into all of that. And it turns out reviewing wine for a decade before you ever pitch a packet of yeast does something to how you make wine, and how you write about it. Worth a post.

What tasting that much wine actually teaches you

It's not what you'd guess. Reviewing two or three new bottles a week for years on end doesn't make you a snob. It does the opposite. You stop chasing prestige labels and start noticing the same handful of things over and over: is the fruit alive, is the finish clean, did somebody panic and over-oak it, would I pour a second glass without thinking about it.

You also calibrate hard on price. After a few hundred club shipments you can pick up a fourteen-dollar bottle and a thirty-five-dollar bottle blind and tell which one is which about eighty percent of the time. The other twenty percent is the interesting twenty percent — that's where most of our favorite reviews live.

What making wine adds on top

Then you start making it. And every single thing you used to mystify suddenly has a mechanic behind it.

Oak isn't a flavor a winemaker chose because they're fancy — it's a tool, and you can feel exactly when somebody used too much of it. Residual sugar isn't "sweetness," it's a specific gravity reading and a decision somebody made on a Tuesday. A wine that smells faintly of wet cardboard isn't "complex," it's lightly oxidized and somebody skipped a topping-up. "Bright" reds aren't a marketing word, they're a malolactic decision.

Once you've made the stuff, you stop being mystified. You become a more honest reviewer — and weirdly, a more forgiving one. You know how easy it is for a perfectly competent batch to go sideways on a hot week.

Five things we now notice in club shipments that we didn't in 2012

Quick list, off the top of thirteen years of notes.

1. Cheap closures. Synthetic corks in a wine that's clearly meant to age a year or two — that's a club cutting cost on the most important piece of the bottle. We catch it now. We didn't used to.

2. Over-oaking as a cover. A surprising number of mid-tier club reds are aggressively oaked to mask thin fruit. Once you've added oak cubes to your own carboy and tasted what they actually do, you can hear it from across the room.

3. The QPR signal. Quality-to-price ratio. The clubs that consistently overdeliver tend to send wines from regions you can't pronounce, with labels that look like a graphic designer wasn't involved. The good stuff almost never has a horse on it.

4. Label theater. Heavy bottle, embossed crest, gold foil capsule. It's a tax. We've poured fifty-dollar bottles dressed like that next to twelve-dollar bottles in screw caps and the screw caps win more often than is comfortable for the wine industry.

5. The two-glass test. We don't trust any review where the reviewer only had one glass. A wine reveals itself in the second glass, sometimes the third. A lot of clubs send wine that's great on sip one and tiring by sip four. That's a real thing. We didn't have language for it in 2012.

Where the two hobbies meet

Making your own wine and subscribing to a club aren't opposites — they're the same hobby on different settings. A club sends you the world. Making sends you yourself. Doing both means you're never going to run out of wine and never going to run out of something to be curious about.

If you'd rather have somebody else pick the bottles for a while — which is honestly a great place to start — go read the reviews. We've been at it a long time.