January 21, 2025: Wine Clubs and Wine Subscriptions

If you’ve ever been to a winery, you’ve probably heard about a wine club. Now you may hear about subscriptions and have yourself wondering what the difference is between them. A few caveats here: this is tailored to our winery as of January 21, 2025, and I’m sure many wineries out there use different terminology and structures for their clubs and subscriptions. Clubs and subscriptions are often changing as wineries adapt their structures to best meet customer needs.

Wine Clubs

So what’s Kalasi Cellars’ wine club? Our wine club is what we consider a “traditional” club. We have scheduled club packages four times a year, and then additional wine releases that members may choose to purchase. Our club requires a 1 year / 4 package commitment, but includes continuous benefits. These benefits include complimentary wine tastings (typically 2 or 4 tastings per membership, and member tastings are customized), discounts on bottle and glass purchases, customizable / editable club packages, discounts on event tickets, invitations to wine release / pick up events, first or exclusive access to new wines (smaller runs of wine are sold to our club, and then they are sold out), etc. Our traditional wine clubs are perfect for patrons that can come visit the tasting room a few times a year as they are best able to realize the benefits of their membership. We often have a low priced or complimentary wine club pick up events where we pair house made foods, like our Valentine’s chocolates, with our favorite wines, or tours of the winery. Many of these experiences are not available to non-club member customers. For some customers that can’t visit the tasting room often, this is still their preferred option if they want access to our most exclusive wines and the largest discount on wines.

Wine Subscription Plans

Alternatively, we also offer a subscription plan. Subscription customers or, as we call them,
“Friends,” receive benefits based on their purchases. So for every 3 bottles purchased, they earn one complimentary wine tasting that’s valid for 12 months. This often means a customer comes in, tastes our wine, and then purchases 3 bottles and immediately receives their complimentary tasting. If they order wine online, then they can stash away complimentary tastings. Along with the earned complimentary tastings, they receive a discount on bottles of wine every time they purchase 3+ bottles. With our subscription, there is no ongoing commitment – friends can delay or skip a package as needed. If you can only make one trip down to our Fredericksburg tasting room a year, but buy 18 bottles a year, you can come with 5 guests, and all 6 of you can enjoy complimentary standard or premium tastings when you visit. So if you live further away, this can be a great option. Others that find this option beneficial are those who have a lot of club memberships already, people just getting into wine, people who travel a lot (easier to reschedule packages than the set processing of a traditional club), etc.

We offer both a traditional club and a subscription plan so that our customers can choose the model that fits best with their needs.