Not long after husband-and-wife duo Chris and Kathryn Hermann founded Double Zero Wines in Carlton, Oregon, in 2015, they started a wine club because, well, they thought they had to.
“We were looking at what other people were doing, especially in the Willamette Valley and California and said, ‘OK, we’ll need a 10% case discount, we’ll ship wine twice a year’ – we checked all the boxes,” says co-proprietor and general manager, Kathryn.
Being part of a winemakers’ collective, the Hermanns don’t have access to the onsite tasting room, which often facilitates community with members. In 2020, as Double Zero settled deeper into the fine wine realm, the Hermanns traded subscriptions for another obligatory model: biannual private allocations. But reserving the best bottles for the biggest spenders likewise felt “icky,” Kathryn says. About six months ago, the couple abandoned clubs altogether in favour of simply putting their wine up for sale on their e-commerce platform.
“Why have we conceived of these weird ways of buying things in the wine world?” Kathryn says. “If someone loves your wine, they want to go online and buy however much or little they want.”
Wine clubs are still a big business for many wineries, accounting for 25% of sales channels in 2025, per Silicon Valley Bank’s Direct to Consumer Wine Report. But growth in recent years has slowed to a trickle, averaging 2% in 2024, down from 5% the year before and 11% in 2018. Some are rethinking the model – trading biannual bottle shipments for experiential discounts or merchandise. Others have abandoned it for more personalized approaches to fostering loyalty, like splashy, in-person wine release drops.
“People change – the things they want, the way they live,” says Jen Cossey, general manager of the stalwart Brooks Wine in Amity, Oregon. “Even if you have the same members for ten years, you need to evolve because your customers are. If you’re not speaking to everybody, you’ll get left behind.”
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