The Best Wine Club in Australia for 2022
Or how to avoid a late night dash to the bottle shop for a crap bottle of wine.
You’re never going to get excited by the regular delivery of your dog’s flea treatment. But a regular delivery of decent wine, straight to your doorstep? Sign us up. The best wine club offers great flexibility, allowing you to choose how often you want your wine delivered and your mix. It doesn’t lock you into a contract and you can pause or cancel any time. Here are our picks for the best wine subscription in Australia, chosen from real Aussie consumer insights and plenty of online shopping.
How we picked
When it comes to wine, it’s all about personal preference. That’s why when it came to choosing Australia’s top wine club, we turned to the people. ProductReview.com.au, Australia’s first consumer opinion website, in fact. We sifted through dozens of listings to find the best wine subscription currently available in Australia.
Once we understood which wine clubs most delighted Aussies, we did some virtual shopping to see how each one worked and what their offering was.
Readers, most wine clubs offer the same thing - local Aussie wines delivered to your door, with no contracts. However, we did find some differences. Like how much you can tailor your wine to your tastes, how much control over your deliveries you have and how many bottles you receive.
Armed with a decent range of options to suit all tastes, budgets and tech savviness, we reckon we’ve found the 6 best wine club subscriptions in Australia.
The best tailored wine club
Excellent pun of a name aside, we love Good Pair Days for how it tailors your wine subscription to your tastes. Even if you fancy yourself a wine buff, you’ve probably found yourself stuck in a rioja rut or sampling a sav (again). Sound like you? Trust Good Pair Days to expand your wine horizons.
Your Good Pair Days experience starts with a short and surprisingly fun quiz. Then Good Pair Days work their wine wizardry and recommend 3 bottles to get you started. Once you’re signed up, you get a box of 3 bottles, starting from $15 per bottle. You can edit your order, including adding more bottles, changing the colour or price tier. (Note you have to order a minimum of 3 bottles.)
Inside the box you’ll find tasting cards, food pairings, matching recipes and the occasional surprise gift. Once you’ve sampled the goods, give feedback and Good Pair Days will suggest your new picks for next month. If you download the app, you can keep track of what you’ve tried and your preferences. Don’t like your picks? Good Pair Days offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. You’ll get a free bottle included in your next delivery.
Like every best wine club, you can cancel, skip or change your wine subscription at any time. Through your account, you can select your box options (like what mix of colours you want) and save your taste preferences, like what grapes to avoid. If that’s not enough goodness, the founder, Banjo Harris Plane, is a 3 times Sommelier of the Year. Which means you’re going to be in safe hands.
Good Pair Days ship Australia wide, with a flat rate of $9. It’s free if you order 4 or more bottles. It’s currently the best wine club in Australia, according to ProductReview.com.au. It gets a full 5 stars from around 450 reviews with Aussies raving about it.
The best for aspiring wine connoisseurs
Keen to hold your own at the next dinner party beyond shoving your nose in a glass and proclaiming ‘mmm, fruity’? Wine Selectors has got your back. That’s because when you join a wine plan, you also become a member of Wine Selectors.
Look, the cynics in us say this membership is an easy way for them to justify charging you $22 every year. But in fairness, you do get a lot for this measly 22 bucks. This includes tasting notes, a birthday treat, invites to exclusive events, access to drink / eat / stay and play deals across Australia’s wine regions and a bi-monthly magazine. All of which should enhance your wine experience.
If you’re not sure where to start, Wine Selectors make it easy with their pre-selected wine club. Their expert tasting panel handpicks wines from over 500 Australian cellar doors. You can choose from regional packs, including Hunter Valley, taste of Australia or organic releases in 6-12 bottle packs. You can choose red, white or mixed and, with some packs, how often to receive them. There are also celebratory selections and a connoisseur collection, which feature more premium wines.
If you’d rather choose your own, you can create a customised wine plan. This lets you select 6 or 12 bottles, your frequency and your preferred wine types.
Wine Selectors reckons their wine club is 100% flexible, as you can skip, pause or stop your deliveries, with no financial catch. Plus, they offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy with a bottle, they’ll refund you that bottle price.
Prices range from $102 to $332. Delivery is free for orders over $299 or starts from $10.99 per case. Wine Selectors get a huge around 4.5 stars from over 500 reviews on ProductReview.com.au.
The best value wine club
With Vinomofo, you don’t know what bottles of wine are going to turn up on your doorstep. If that excites rather than terrifies you, you’re in the right place. According to their borderline NSFW website, Vinomofo is all about ‘boozing like a baller on a dirtbag budget’. Which means you’re getting wines from all around the world for about 15 bucks a bottle.
What you’re not getting is much choice or personalisation. You’ve got 2 main choices: The Mofo Club or the Black Market Club. The Mofo Club gets you 12 bottles of wine every 1, 2 or 3 months. You can choose white, mixed or reds and 1 grape you’d rather avoid. The Black Market Club gets you 12 bottles of mixed wine, every month and no exclusions.
You’re also not getting hardcopy tasting notes. They’re digital only and available from your account page once your case has been delivered. Don’t like a wine? You can get a refund or credit and there are 3 easy ways you can get it back to them, for free. Prices range from $139 to $179 and shipping is free for wine subscriptions. At these prices, we reckon Vinomofo is Australia’s best value wine club.
Vinomofo gets around 4 stars on ProductReview.com.au from over 50 reviews. There seem to be a few complaints around the quality of Vinomofo wine so if you’re a real wine buff, you might be better off elsewhere.
The best for getting close to winemakers
If you’ve always fancied being a boutique winemaker but never got around to it, Naked Wines is the next best thing. Kinda. Not strictly a wine club, instead you become an ‘Angel’ (a Naked Wines member) and deposit $40 into your account each month. Naked Wines then uses this to pay independent Australian and New Zealand winemakers to produce wine exclusively for its customers. So, you’re not going to find any big label wines here but you are going to find small batch, exclusive wine made just for you. (And er, other Angels.)
You can choose when to use this $40 monthly credit. As an Angel, you get Angel-only pricing, access to Angel-exclusive wines and the warm fuzzies from helping talented ‘little guy’ winemakers’ ‘dreams come true’.
According to Naked Wines, you can get your monthly payments paused or refunded any time. However, CHOICE has an interesting article about Naked Wines subscription confusion. This is where shoppers think they’re making an one-off purchase but actually, they’ve signed up for the $40 monthly Angel membership. Make sure you know what you’re buying. However, Naked Wines has over 2,000 reviews on ProductReview.com.au and around 4.5 stars. Although the reviews are mainly great, there are a lot of recent complaints about vouchers and the Angel membership ‘scam’.
Delivery is free to Sydney, Melbourne or Perth metro areas. Like all the best wine subscriptions, if you don’t like a wine, they’ll refund or credit you, as long as it’s within 30 days of your order. Unlucky if you’re on the final bottle of 12 and it’s taken you longer than 30 days to get that far in your case...
The best local wine club
Sure, most of our picks supply local Aussie wine. But unlike some of our picks, Wine Direct is a proudly South Aussie family owned and operated business. So not only are you getting Aussie wine, you’re also supporting local. Nice.
That’s not the only reason we rate Wine Direct. We also like how simple its wine club is. It’s been around since 1997, so they’ve had time to perfect it.
You get the choice of 3 price levels (99 Buck, Platinum and Premium) which each have a white, red and mixed option that showcase local wine . Each case has 12 bottles and you can choose how many cases you want and when - how often per day (!), week or month.
You know upfront what you’re getting in each case (winemaker and type of wine) and they change every 3 months. Prices range from $99 to $195, including free delivery. There’s no contract and you can pause or cancel whenever you want. Plus, if you don’t like the wine, they’ll refund you.
The best boutique wine club
You won’t find any big name wineries at Cloudwine. They specialise in small Australian wineries and limited production wines, with no factories in sight. If you’re after boutique and different wines, you’re in the right place.
There’s also no fancy machinery in sight. Because if you join the Cloudwine wine club, they hand select your wine by walking around their south Melbourne store which stocks over 1,000 wines. With Cloudwine, there aren’t any pre-selected cases to choose from. Instead, you tell them your budget for a 12 pack (starting from $200). You then choose your frequency and your mix of wines (white, red, both or go crazy and let Cloudwine decide). Finally, tell them any varieties you’re not a fan of. Then sit back and let Cloudwine do the hard work for you.
There’s free delivery Australia-wide and you can change the frequency of your delivery, your mix or your budget whenever you want. You can also cancel or pause any time. Cloudwine reckons they’re one of Australia’s original wine clubs as they’ve been posting wine to happy customers for 20 years.
Like all the best wine clubs, they offer a 100% money back guarantee if you don’t like a wine.
Common Questions
Are wine clubs worth it?
Before you get carried away with the thought of delicious wines delivered to your door, take a look at the pros and cons of wine clubs.
Wine clubs are great because they:
- Are really convenient - no more last-minute stops at the shop for a bottle.
- Usually offer wine picked by wine connoisseurs, which you might not be.
- Can be cheaper than shop prices (more on that below).
- Sometimes get you access to exclusive wine that you won’t find anywhere else.
- Usually include local Aussie wines so you’re supporting local independent winemakers.
- Come with extras, like tasting notes so you can learn more about what you’re quaffing.
- Can be tailored to your likes and dislikes while also presenting you different options you might not otherwise try.
Wine clubs are not-so-great because they:
- Might not deliver the value for money you think you’re getting (see below).
- Don’t give you the opportunity to try before you buy (although all our picks offer you a refund or credit if you don't like a wine).
- Assume that one-taste-suits-all (it doesn’t).
- Can trap you into a subscription that you didn’t know you were signing up for (here’s looking at you Naked Wines).
- Can be difficult to cancel (biggest bugbear we found was this).
- Lock you into minimum purchase quantities - you might not want 12 bottles a month.
- Usually have high delivery charges outside big cities.
- Might lead you to drink more alcohol than you normally would.
Do wine clubs save you money?
According to the wine club websites, with huge discounts splashed everywhere, yes. In reality? Perhaps not so much.
It’s really hard to say if wine clubs represent good value for money. First, there’s the fact that retailers can inflate the RRP of a bottle to make it seem like you’re getting a ridiculous price. Think those ads that scream: “RRP $35, our price $25”. Second, you can’t easily check the RRP of a bottle because it’s only available through that specific retailer. Which means you have no way of knowing if that RRP is correct.
There are free apps that can let you know more about a wine, including prices, what the reviews say and whether it’s won any awards. Check out Delectable, Vivino or Wine Searcher.
How do wine clubs work?
Most wine clubs work by you visiting their website to sign up. When you sign up, you:
- Choose which wine club you want to join. There are normally different price levels and styles to choose from. Most wine clubs offer 6 or 12 bottles per case. Good Pair Days is unusual in offering from 3 bottles.
- Then set how many cases you want to receive (1 or more) and how often (this can be weekly (!), monthly or another frequency).
- Choose whether to receive white, red or a mix and note any varieties you don’t want included.
- Pay the amount shown - this continues to be taken from your card at the frequency you selected (weekly, monthly, etc.)
You should be able to pause or cancel your wine subscription at any time without paying any fees.
Why should I join a wine club?
A wine club regularly delivers (hopefully) delicious wine to your door. Which means it takes the convenience of online shopping to a whole new level - you don't even need to remember to order it.
If you’re the type of person to get overwhelmed at the bottle shop or don’t know where to start with choosing your next tipple, a wine club can be a great help. Especially because wine experts are the ones picking your bottles. This gives you some confidence that you might like what you get.
The best wine subscription means you’ll never have to dash to the shop when you’ve got the urge for a glass of wine in the evening. It also means you’ll always be well-stocked for dinner parties.
The best wine club doesn’t just send you decent bottles of plonk. It also:
- Lets you know more about what you’re drinking, maybe through tasting notes.
- Introduces you to new wines and winemakers you’ve probably never heard of to help with your wine education. Because let’s face it, that’s the hobby 2020 needs.
- Is somewhat tailored to your taste. We reckon Good Pair Days does this best currently, with their rating system. At a minimum, you should be able to select red, white or mixed and note which varieties to avoid.
- Supports local winemakers, especially the smaller, boutique ones.
Taste is subjective, so make sure your wine club offers a money-back guarantee on any bottles you don’t like.
Sources
- ‘Best Wine & Liquor Shops’, ProductReview.com.au
- ‘Are wine clubs worth joining?,’ CHOICE
