Issue 11 · August 05, 2026

Collecting sunsets

Thirty months. That's how long the average wine club member stays now.

In Maine, summer arrives like a rumor. You get mud season first, then black flies and no-see-ums so thick you can taste them, then a random morning of snow flurries in June just to remind you who's in charge. Then summer, briefly, ferociously, and then September with its first frosts before anyone was ready. This was before climate change softened the edges. Back then Maine had two seasons, winter and the fourth of July.

At the University of Maine we had a ritual. After an all-night party, or sometimes just before finals when sleep was already a lost cause, a rotating cast of APO and Gamma Sig would jam into whichever car had enough gas and a driver sober enough to use it. Sometimes my 1972 Plymouth Fury, sometimes somebody else's. Mark, my roommate. Rich, Diana, Teresa, DeeDee, whoever else was awake. Cadillac Mountain at sunrise. Bad gas station coffee poured into a thermos somebody's parent had given them before freshman year. You'd stand up there in the cold and watch the light come up over the Atlantic and for a few minutes nothing else existed, not the exam, not the semester, not whatever happened the night before. Then we'd drive back toward campus and stop at Dysart's truck stop off I-95 in Hermon, and eat like people who had earned it, and the day would begin as if none of it had happened.

I didn't know then that I was collecting anything. It felt like surviving.

I spent more than a decade after that as an interpretive ranger at six National Park Service sites, and Acadia was the one that never let go. The stars on a clear night with no competing light for miles. Thunder Hole at full tide, the wave finding the cavity in the rock and the sound coming up through your boots before it reached your ears. The way the coast goes quiet in that last moment before first light, as if it knows what's coming.

I never wrote any of it down. I didn't need to. Those moments wrote themselves into me in a way that nothing since has managed to overwrite.

The sunsets came later. The Golden Gate at dusk, the light going orange over the water. A hillside in Tuscany where the sun drops behind the cypress and the whole valley goes still. Different rocks, same instinct. I just didn't have a name for it until a wine club letter arrived on a Tuesday morning in July.

I read the whole thing at my desk in Sparks. I don't usually do that.

It was from Croix Estate, announcing their summer allocation, and it went somewhere I didn't expect. Most of its length went to a man named Geoff, the father of the writer's closest childhood friend, who had traveled the world and kept a weathered leather notebook of sunsets. Dates, places, one sentence each. Mendocino. Iceland. The Indian Ocean off Western Australia.

"So I don't forget I was there," Geoff told him one evening.

Then the line that stopped me. A bottle of wine, the writer said, is simply a collection of vanishings.

I sat at my desk in Sparks reading that sentence and I was briefly back on Cadillac Mountain in the cold, watching the Atlantic decide to show up one more time.

Most wine club letters I receive describe the wine. This one described why wine exists.

The difference matters more than it used to. Silicon Valley Bank's 2026 direct-to-consumer report found club acquisition rates holding roughly steady while cancellation rates climbed, leaving net membership essentially flat across the industry. Average member tenure has fallen from thirty-six months to thirty. Close to forty percent of members cancel inside the first year. Thirty months means the average member receives five or six letters before they go. Every one of those letters was a chance to remind them why they joined.

The letters that describe the wine are not wrong. The vintage details are accurate. The tasting notes are competent. The allocation terms are clear. Everything a member needs to make a decision is present. What is missing is the reason to care about the decision, which is the one thing no tech sheet supplies.

The Croix letter worked because it started somewhere the writer actually lived. A real person, a real notebook, a real evening. By the time the wine appeared in the letter it had somewhere to land. The 2024 5 Wells Pinot Noir is their final vintage from that vineyard. Under ordinary circumstances that reads as a closing of accounts. After Geoff's notebook it reads as exactly what it is, a sunset that won't come twice.

That's not a copywriting technique. It's a prior commitment to finding the story before sitting down to write.

Most club letters skip that step, not from laziness but from habit. The pipeline runs from tasting notes to deadline to send. The winemaker gets consulted on the wine. Nobody asks what the winemaker was thinking about the morning they decided to pick, or what this vintage means against the ones that came before, or what will be different now that this particular block is gone. Those questions take twenty minutes. The answers are what keep members.

I drove out to Croix a few days after the letter arrived. I came home with several bottles, which was not the plan when I left Sparks. But the letter had already done something to me before I got in the car. It had made me feel like I was going somewhere that understood what it was keeping, and what it was about to lose.

Retention conversations tend to start with price point and pickup rates. Those are real numbers worth watching. They are also the second question. The first is whether the member, reading the letter on a Tuesday morning in July, feels anything at all.

Geoff collected sunsets because they vanished. He wrote them down so he knew he was there. A wine club letter that does the same work, that places a member inside the story of the wine before the wine even arrives, is doing something most letters never attempt.

The allocation window is open now. Whether a member orders or sets the letter aside was decided by the words that came before the wines, on a Tuesday morning, by a letter that either pulled them in or didn't.

Patrick R. Dunn is the founder of Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for winery owners, tasting room managers, and boutique hotel GMs. The Vianarra newsletter publishes every Wednesday at newsletter.vianarra.com.