The story found along the way

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By Patrick R. Dunn

What came in the mail

I joined a new wine club recently. The welcome email arrived the same day. It said I was receiving it because I had just become a member, gave the name of my membership level, and asked me to visit the winery's website. It was signed by the corporation. That was the welcome.

I belong to more clubs than I should, and this season I went back through what they sent me.

One sent a preview of my fall order. Four bottles of Cabernet, the member discount, the shipping, the date my card would be charged, and a note from the club manager asking me to review it carefully. The shipping status at the bottom read Hold Ship. The only things it told me about the wine were the vintage and the price. It is very good wine. I would have liked to hear from somebody who made it.

Several others now send some version of the same email: my allocation is ready for customization. There is a link, a deadline, and a line or two on each wine that reads like tasting notes after a lobotomy.

One sent a rosé offer in the middle of summer. Cherry skin, strawberry juice, rose petal, eight barrels produced, thirty-four dollars, and a closing line that read “Summertime, perfectly bottled.” That is the same winery that used to send a letter from the owner about his boyhood memories of a sunset. It stayed with me long enough that I later built an issue of this newsletter around it. The club still ships. The letters stopped.

A lot of those stories went to Instagram and Facebook, where wineries are working to reach younger buyers. That is a reasonable place to look for them. I don't read either one every day, and I doubt I am the only member who doesn't. The people most likely to miss a story that lives only on social media are the ones who have been paying for shipments all along.

What does still reach me is the phone. Every so often one of my clubs calls. There is no ask about how things are going or how the last shipment drank. It launches straight into a sales pitch for a special promotion and a push to buy more. I am already a member. The call is the most personal contact I get from the winery all year, and it comes across as desperate.

The direct-to-consumer shipping channel contracted by nearly 970,000 cases in 2025. That was a 15% drop in volume and the hardest year for the DTC market since tracking began in 2010, according to Sovos ShipCompliant and WineBusiness Analytics. Silicon Valley Bank data reported by Forbes in June shows average acquisition rates of 26% nearly offset by attrition rates of 22%, leaving net membership static for most wineries. Those numbers do not say why any one member leaves. They do say wineries are losing members almost as fast as they sign them up, during the same years the letters to those members went quiet.

The September Club Chevalier insert, packed in the box with the wine.

What came in the box

Two of this season's mailings were different.

Scott Becker at Realm Cellars opened his fall release with a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother in 1882, which is a lot to ask of a release email. Then he got down to the vineyards. He wrote about buying Farella from the family that planted it, with the core blocks now close to thirty years old. He wrote about ten years of adding misting systems at Moonracer so the vines could ride out heat spikes, and about having enough tank space at Houyi to pick the whole vineyard in a few days when the late heat came. He explained why one wine was staying in barrel until spring and what he was releasing in its place. By the end I knew why each bottle was in the offer. He closed by thanking the members for making the work possible.

Kermit Lynch sent a club email that was mostly shipping: weather holds, a new quarterly schedule, the signature requirement. Even that one ended with a single paragraph from someone at the shop who tasted a Pinot Nero drawn from the only barrel of it in the cellar, in Piedmont, and went from skeptical to convinced in one sip. Then the box came.

Packed in with the wine was a printed insert for the September Club Chevalier, built around Pinot Noir from places nobody expects it. Federico Staderini, who makes the Cuna, wrote about spending his teenage summers helping a shepherd across Tuscany and Romagna, deciding in the Casentino valley to become an agronomist, and coming back twenty years later to run a soil survey because he thought Pinot Noir could grow there. Valentin Montanet explained why he blends Volnay and Mercurey with fruit from his hometown of Vézelay, and what each village brings to the wine. At the back is a table with the age of the vines, the soil, the serving temperature, and when to drink each bottle. More emails followed through the month, and they were all story. Before I opened the first bottle, I knew who made each wine and why it was in the box.

Neither of those is a new idea. Wineries used to write to their members as a matter of course. They used to throw real pickup parties too. Enriquez Estate Wines held paella feeds around their releases, the first one around Mother's Day, and members drove out for the wine instead of waiting for the box. One of the wineries I buy from is doing it this fall, with a barbecue lunch on the estate and the debut of their first Sémillon. I don't mean the big ticketed tasting weekends where the crowd moves from winery to winery trying to drink its money's worth. A pickup party is for the people who already belong.

Most of this fall's wine arrives in the next few weeks, and someone 21 or older has to sign for every box. I'll be home.

Data sources: Sovos ShipCompliant and WineBusiness Analytics, 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Shipping Report. Silicon Valley Bank 2026 DTC data as reported in Forbes, June 2026.

P.S. The Pour Story Society, a biweekly newsletter for the wine-drinking side of this list, launches October 2 at newsletter.vianarra.com/pour-story-society.