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 ($399) 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. 

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 $872 per year for its Italian Wine Club 1, or the Italian Wine Club 2 at $1,179 a year. Join the exclusive Collector Clubs (currently on a waitlist), and this club will run you $2,192 to $4,383 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 members 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.

Which subscriptions didn’t make the cut and why

Our picks were chosen through a mix of personal experience, reviews from industry-leading wine and food sites, and customer reviews from casual enthusiasts via third-party sites like TrustPilot and HighYa. We also took into consideration factors such as customer service, ease of site navigation and breadth of selection.

Though media companies are credited with kicking off the wine club renaissance in 2008 (think The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times), they use one of a few, massive wine merchants to fill their orders. As a result, these companies, along with older clubs like Laithwaite’s and Turner Classic Movies’, essentially pull from the same lot, often marking up prices in the process. The lack of value and unique offerings excluded these services from our list. Some of the older clubs like Vinesse and California Wine Club do deliver a high-quality selection, but they also have text-heavy sites that are exhausting to navigate as well as cancellation policies that involve tedious phone calls.

 and Firstleaf are great examples of quiz-based wine clubs that offer customizable breadth to consumers. However, Bright Cellars, which also uses a quiz to discern customers’ likes and dislikes, did not make our list. We found that this particular club ships lackluster wines, the palate quiz often spits out the same or nearly identical recommendations for very different people and its customer service could be better.

Wine Awesomeness, which taps into millennial wanderlust with its international offerings, gets tons of press (it even publishes its own magazine). Despite this impeccably crafted aesthetic, the club’s subscribers and reviewers found the wines boring and also reported some serious shipping issues. 

Tasting Room was considered for our trial-size wine pick, but it has gained a reputation as a bait-and-switch service. Most online reviewers loved the introductory taste test, only to be disappointed with the wine curation afterward. 

In recent years, food-delivery services have also gotten into the wine-subscription service. Both Blue Apron and HelloFresh rolled out wine subscription add-ons to their popular meal delivery services. Blue Apron’s smaller, half-liter offerings tend to be more premium than HelloFresh’s, but both have a strong hit-or-miss reputation and don’t take your palate into consideration by only providing direct meal pairings, which is why they ultimately didn’t make our list.

We absolutely loved the premium, boutique wine offerings of Pour This from renowned sommelier Ashley Ragovin, but her subscription service has been terminated. We looked into SommSelect monthly wine club as an alternative, but its selection doesn’t quite offer the rare finds that Ragovin could produce.

How we evaluated wine clubs and subscriptions

Our picks were chosen through a mix of personal experience, in-depth reviews from industry leaders and customer reviews from third-party review platforms such as TrustPilot and HighYa. We also took into consideration factors such as customer service, ease of site navigation and breadth of wines to choose from to help you find the best wine subscription services. We did not personally test every service on this list but we update as we try them.

Best wine subscriptions FAQs

Is wine cheaper when you buy it online?

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 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. 

How do I pick the best wine club for me?

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.

This article was written by J. Fergus and originally published on CNET’s former sister site Chowhound.

More wine advice and delivery service recommendations 

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