In praise of The Wine Society

Do you enjoy a wee drop of wine from time to time? Whilst you're not given to the economically ruinous and frankly distasteful business of chucking £1000-a-bottle-claret down your thrapple, do you care enough about getting a decent bottle to sidestep the two-bottles-for-a-fiver options offered by your local 24-hour grocery shop? Well, if you enjoy wine, may I urge you to join The Wine Society forthwith?

Why should you join? The main reason is that the Society (full name: International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Ltd) is a mutual. As Will Lyons put it in the Wall Street Journal:

"...as a mutual, the Wine Society is owned by its members, so the primary concern of its management committee is, in the words of their buying director, Master of Wine Sebastian Payne, to offer good quality wine to members at minimum-added cost. The day-to-day concerns of other international wine retailers, such as growing profit margins and increasing market share, come second to finding and selling the wines its members want to drink."

This is the very thing - one needn't be in thrall to the writings of Karl Marx to realise that the Society's model is damn near perfect if what you're about is good drinking for a sensible price: it's a large, long-established, well managed and resourced organisation whose profits go back into the business, and not to meddling, pin-stripe-clad investor types.

Not only does mutual status bring you a better quality of vino, you'll also find that there are other small pleasures to be had in what the men who say "Damn!" (from A Bit of Fry and Laurie) would call "the customer experience", such as the Society's use of its own fleet of vans and drivers - you'll find that you're spared the travails which often go hand-in-hand with having stuff delivered by a courier company. The Society also widely and clearly publishes its telephone number and email address - phone them and there shall be no death-by-Vivaldi.

It costs £40 to buy a lifetime share, and there is no ongoing commitment to buy. The Society is A Very Good Thing.

* Two wine bloggers - both proud Society members - worthy of mention are Tom Parnell and Simon Woolf.

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One wee suggestion I have for the Society concerns the structuring of its offers of wines en primeur.

Let's say that, like me, you'd like to order a couple of cases of a decent 2010 Bordeaux such as Chateau Angludet, costing £250 per case of 12 bottles (plus VAT and duty). I already own a case of the 2009, and I'd really like to have the 2010 too: both are good (though quite different) years, and it strikes me that I could pass a rather jolly evening, sitting by myself on the occasion of my 50th birthday, with a bottle of the 2009 and 2010 in each of my paws.

So, come the 15th of June 2011 - the day of the release of the first chunk of 2010 Bordeaux onto the Society's website - I ordered the wines, submitting my credit card details in the process. However, as my "Confirmation of Request Only" email states:

"Please find attached confirmation of receipt of your order for wines from the 2010 Bordeaux In Bond offer. These details are being entered into our allocation system and you will receive notification of wines allocated to you by Monday 8th August 2011 at the latest."

I rather wish they would change this process: it seems that my (modest) desire to buy this wine, and my loyalty to the Society, are not compatible. I actually requested a further three cases of wine on 15th June, but, come August, I may be allocated none. (Earlier in the year, a friend and I both requested some red Burgundy en primeur from the Society - I ordered three cases, he ordered an impressively bibulous seventeen cases. How many were we each allocated? One case.)

Another added little frustration is that, if one were to rely on an (ultimately unsuccessful) request for allocation, the wines could sell out in the interim from other merchants running a straightforward, first-come-first-served system.

The Society's lottery system should probably apply to the investment-grade top wines, especially in strong vintages - but for Joe Punter who actually has the radical intention of drinking his £100-£300 claret, a simpler, straightforward purchase system is surely preferable.