I think they regularly offer it for $59.99 / year after a $20 discount.
I’m sitting on a $100 off $300 coupon right now and contemplating it but not sure if I need another wine website to purchase from (I already purchase regularly from casemates, winespies, wtso, and just added lastbottle and garagiste to my list).
Agree with all the comments above. www.winebounty.com is a good aggregator site that you can see all the flash/discount site offers. They also show the past offers which will give you an idea of what the various flash sites have been selling of late.
This website is a godsend. I spend so much time checking each website some days. Thanks!
Purchasing online can be an extremely effective method of turning a $20 bottle of wine into a $40 bottle of wine, via the magic of Shipping & Handling.
Maybe if you lived somewhere like Antarctica, you’d be forced to order all of your wine online, but unless the bottle were roughly $100+, shipping it would not generally be a sound* financial decision.
How does this apply to the question?
You might want to check out the sites first. They generally offer free shipping.
As far as pros and cons - sometimes they get pretty good deals when distributors are trying to clear out inventory. And depending on where you live, they may or may not have access to things your market does not. And both WTSO and Last Bottle will hold for customers who don’t want things shipped in the heat.
Cons are that they mostly sell stuff you probably don’t want, and on LB in particular, the prices aren’t usually too great.
If you decide against it, I will put that coupon to good use. It seems like the coupons will continue in some form. Pricing obviously varies by bottle, but generally if I’m getting a 20%+ coupon or cash back, I’m probably at or below Wine-Searcher’s low price.
Other “deal” options not mentioned include wineaccess.com, winetext.com (operated by Wine Library), and vinformant.com
In terms of value and the ability to get a lot of different wines at a reasonable cost, i think all of the options mentioned provide a great deal of potential value to someone starting out. I do agree with what folks have said - your ability to find these kinds of prices at retail depends on where you live. I certainly save money vs what I’d pay in the DC area for most of these wines.
The problem with all of them is that if you’re not already familiar with the market, it can be a challenge to identify the real opportunities. It’s not always easy to identify NDA wines and wines from poor producers and poor vintages from the stuff you should be going after… and some of the sites like WTSO.com put out multiple offers a day and sell out of the best deals fairly quickly. I’ve ended up helping out some friends by watching over the offers and pointing out the ones to them that they should take advantage of.
I’ll also put two cents in for Wine Library’s “Library Pass” offer - $99/year for free shipping on most of what they sell. Their selection isn’t what it once was, but if you’re buying a lot of wine, that offer saves a pile of money fast… and it also applies to their winetext.com and cellartext.com offers.
I know wine.com has a similar, cheaper offering but their prices in my state are always terrible… but their prices vary by state so it may be better elsewhere.
I’m guilty of having bought a good bit of wine from Wine Library’s WineText and Cinderella Wines, Last Bottle and WTSO.
Wine Library tends to sell primarily on the basis of points and scores. Ergo lots of Suckling, Maroni and Halliday ratings. Their Cinderella site seems to have become a place to recycle previous offers that didn’t sell out. The plethora of daily email offerings of the same thing items time and again can become overwhelming. If you are going to be buying often from them, purchasing their Library Pass can get you ‘free’ shipping without choking on the daunting quantities necessary to get shipping included with the offer.
Last Bottle can have some pretty interesting and unusual California wines from time to time. They can serve as an conduit to trying some up and coming wineries, ie Halcon back when. While they will hold for cooler weather shipping, in the past it has been an issue with their Marathons, and some desirable held wines seem to have a tendency to disappear prior to being shipped. In the early years, they seemed to offer a number of oxidized low end white wines, but I don’t get the sense that is as much an issue anymore.
With WTSO there seem to be a lot of essentially ‘house brands’ with inflated ‘comparable prices’, and little or no Cellar Tracker sales by other vendors. Sometimes they offer imports that are pretty much unknown to the US. I watch for vintages from established wineries that are a bit past the current one, since those seem to be the cases of wineries dumping old stock. For me, they’ve been a great source for discounted Oregon pinot noir and occasionally daily drinker Chablis.
As for bottle condition, I’ve had no more indications of storage issues than bottles purchased from any source, aside from winery direct.
The service from the WTSO is exemplary. Put charitably, LB has been a bit hit and miss for me. Wine Library might need a little nudge now and again but when that happens, they are generally responsive to problems.
All that said, these cannot replace establishing a relationship with a good retailer. They can often point you to new wines you will like, and offer you coveted wines that you won’t see on the liquidator sites. Your rate of misses will tend to be much lower with them. Using the flash sale and liquidator sites is much easier when you already have a good sense of the lay of the land.
Tom
My guess would be that if they’re offering free shipping on $20 bottles of wine, then the true retail value of the wine is probably down around $7.50 to $10.00 [and maybe even less].
Again, I don’t have any experience in this market segment, but it feels like a con job to me, where they’re fooling people into believing that the wines down in the bargain bin are as good as the wines higher up on the shelves.
As heavy and as fragile as wine is, I don’t see how even the biggest online merchants could negotiate a shipping cost much less than about $7.50 to $10.00 per bottle; it seems like UPS & FedEx would go bankrupt if they were moving heavy glass bottles at less than that.
And somebody’s gotta pay for the cardboard & the styrofoam & the packaging tape.
My guess is that the large online merchants purchase the wines [en masse, from wholesaler & importer closeouts] at about $5 per bottle, spend about $7.50 to $10 per bottle on shipping & handling, and clear about $5 to $7.50 per bottle in gross revenue.
I also don’t see how it’s possible to pay employees anything even remotely resembling a “Living Wage” at those kinds of margins.
You’d need to sell on the order of hundreds of thousands of those “$20” bottles in order to pay your employees even a meager salary.
But I suppose the bottom line is whether the wine in the freely-shipped $20 bottle actually tastes good or not [employees be damned].
I think most of these sites likely do not employ much for employees - maybe a handful of people in the shipping/receiving area, and a couple of CS/Admin people, on top of the ownership / wine buyers.
And I hazard a guess that the amount of volume with these does get them very good pricing on shipping, probably in the $2-3 a bottle level. Even Underground Cellar (which I would not call a deal site) only charges arouund $38 for a full case of wine if you’re paying shipping. I’m guessing their negotiated rates are about half that.
Really at question is how much the sites utilize as margin and their pricing strategies. I know that a site like casemates is grossing around 10-20 cases a day and they’re a relatively small operation. They charge $2 / btl shipping if you don’t have their membership which is better than most.
While you may not have any experience in this market segment, many here do, and there are thousands of pages devoted to these topics on this site. Your guess is way, way off on the cost of shipping paid by large retailers. No way wine.com is paying $90-120 a case to ship. And while I’m sure most of the products from flash sites are either some form of closeouts or are direct imports, and while many likely aren’t very good, others are known quantities. Sometimes even great wines are closed out at bargain pricing, whether online or in traditional retail.
It’s probably best to look beyond flash sites, which have very limited inventories and could rely heavily on closeouts and direct imports. Consider retailers like Empire, Saratoga, and B-21, to name just a few. These retailers have a huge variety of wines, extensive product lists, typically offered at the lowest prices in the country per wine-searcher pro. They each charge about $25 per case for shipping, except B-21, which charges $12 per 12 bottle case, including mixed cases, over $200. These aren’t closeouts or unwanted wines. These are the current releases of widely distributed wines from around the world, at the lowest prices in the country, shipped for approx. $1-2/btl on case quantities. Then there are, as previously mentioned, options like wine.com and winelibrary who offer unlimited shipping for one annual fee. There are simply tons of options for free or very low cost shipping.
As I see it, unless you’re lucky enough to live near amazing retailers, with both great selection and great pricing, then shipping almost certainly makes more sense economically. This is to say nothing of the benefits of a good local wine shop, or the vagaries of shipping laws, as I’m speaking only to the economic and selection issues. Flash sites, IMO, require more careful selection if they are used.
FBPR50 Wine.com for new customers $50 off $150 for me is worth buying a few bottles. Anyone know what shipping per bottle is normally?
Last I bought from Empire they were at $40+ for shipping, same with Saratoga. That said, the combo of pricing and shipping they are still significantly cheaper than what I can get.
$40 shipping to Denver is a great deal. I have been quoted $50 from Chicago to Minneapolis. That is not a good deal.
This may depend on your wine.com warehouse, but for me, shipping is $20 for 3 bottles, $29 for 6 and $40 for 12. There is also the option to buy unlimited shipping for $59 a year (called Stewardship).
$60 for the year is a great deal. Never really look into buying from them with all their coupons and deals. I like to know the price up front but if you can do shipping that cheap for a year they certainly have some nice wines once you apply the coupons.
$25 is Midwest so I’d assume Denver kicks into a higher bracket.
You get what you pay for. Still true today.
Well if you are looking for a specific wine, sometimes auction sites are worthwhile. I had the yen to get a couple of more modern bottles of Williams Selyem pinot this weekend and scouted winebid. Had a couple of bottles of Westside Neighbors 2019 listed for $60 per (low bid). Got them both with fees for $151 all in. Lowest WS price was $99.00 before tax and shipping. Release price from the winery is $120per unit. As long as you are not looking for high demand Burgs right now there are plenty of other categories that are being overlooked completely as the money is chasing particular labels regardless of the wine inside. Shocked the other day to see Roumier Clos de la Bussiere going for $400.00 a bottle…yikes! Got offered that wine for $160.00 a year or two ago. Pretty sure the Williams Selyem Westside will provide a lot of bang for the buck compared to a $400.00 premiere Cru that is not all that incredible.
I understand the general spirit of your post, but I fear that too often in wine one doesn’t get what they pay for, in a sense. If a wine costs $50 plus shipping from retailer A or $30 from B with free shipping, does the wine drink any differently? I’d think not, assuming a current release wine where variables such as storage are not at issue. Additionally, there is an ocean of overpriced wine out there, and similarly an ocean of lovely but underappreciated wine. Yes, one should probably avoid unheard of wines, even if they look like a deal, but if you can find a great price on a wine you believe to be good then I say take it.
You guys are quoting prices which make my jaw drop.
$1 per bottle in shipping fees?!?!?
I’ll have to take your word for it - I’ve never seen any such thing being offered to me.
And goodness only knows who’s ultimately paying for the final product.
Maybe the close-out specialists are purchasing the wines at $2.00 per bottle, and reselling them at $20 per bottle, with “free” S&H for the retail customer?
What does a bottle of wine weigh, 4 or 5 pounds? When I go to UPS, and send something heavy, I don’t get anywhere close to $1 per 5 lbs shipped.
Probably more like $15 or $20 or $25 per 5 lbs shipped.
I don’t see how the close-out specialists make this work, nor do I see how UPS makes this work.
PS: I don’t think they have robots yet which can reliably sort and package glass bottles of wine; I think almost everyone is still using human beings for those jobs, and, as above, each of those human beings is gonna hafta be packaging tens of thousands of bottles per year to achieve a living wage.
I honestly don’t see how it works, unless maybe they’re hiring a bunch of illegal aliens who are cool with the idea of getting repetitive motion disorders from packaging all those bottles.