How do we choose our wines for the Barolo wine club?
Choosing wines for our Barolo Wine Club shipments is probably the most exciting part of our job! So how do we go about selecting the right ones? Here is a little checklist about what is involved in our wine selection process.
Visit the wineries in person to see the facility and meet the winemakers
This is one of the most important parts of our selection process. We are lucky to live in Piemonte where we can taste a range of wines from one winery and learn about their winemaking techniques and philosophy directly from the winemaker. We ask ourselves if the wine meets the following criteria:
Small production – Limited number of bottles that are not easy to find outside Italy
High quality – We all have different tastes and since wine can be so subjective, we must be confident that the wine is quality and made with love.
Story to tell – What makes this wine unique? What can we say about this wine? These are the questions we ask ourselves when choosing one for our club.
Delicious – Of course the most important thing is that we think the wine is delicious!
Negotiate with the winery to provide us with enough wine to fill our order
This can be harder than you think which is why I leave this dirty job to Claudio! Many times, believe it or not, the wineries are so small that sometimes it is challenging for them to guarantee enough bottles for us, especially for Barolo and Barbaresco.
Write tasting notes, tech sheets, schedule winemaker videos and phone calls.
Creating content and educational materials is super fun for me but it surely does take up time! In the last few years we have changed the content style due to lockdowns etc. but are very proud of our printed materials and can’t wait to keep improving!
A lot of invoices and administrative tasks before shipping
Thank god for Claudio who takes care of all these tedious jobs. This takes up most of our time!
Personally collect the wines and fulfill the orders
We are now over 100 members so can you imagine us laying out 100+ shipping boxes on the floor, keeping track of each member’s order and packing the wine. BUT before we do that, we have to put government stickers on each and every bottle. If you do the math, you can see that this process can take days.
Send off the wines which is a huge relief!
The whole process is quite time consuming to say the least but it is done with love and passion! When we say goodbye to all these boxes, we are filled with relief but also with a sense of anxiety as we hope our members love the wines as much as we do.
The Barolo Wine Club takes pride in supporting small wineries and businesses and we are also just that ourselves! We love knowing ALL of your names and faces, many from past tours or social networks. If you would like to be one of our lucky Piemonte wine club members we would love to have you on board.
