They have plenty of decant wines to spend your $500 on. The Bordeaux wines as mentioned would work along with spirits as mentioned above. In MN I would just sample the craft beers from the Midwest over the next 12 months.
I picked up a couple of well-priced 2006 Billecart Salmon Cuvée Nicholas to get past the finish line this afternoon.
Once you sign up for their program, Total Wine sends out every month either a 15% or 20% off coupon, for various wines. It is a nice way to fill up on 2014 Bordeaux, if you missed out on futures.
Thanks,
Ed
Coche Mersault
What is grand reserve status, and how much spending does it take to get it?
25,000 points for Grand Reserve status.
But get this- you get 10 points for every dollar spent on wine, and 15 points for every dollar spend on Winery Direct wines (which covers a great many of the top Bordeaux and CA selections, plus a number of burgs and champagnes.) So it is not all that hard to get there.
What you can do with those points varies by state due to certain state laws- and so the actual redemption potential varies. But universally you get advance notice of, and access to, certain things.
So it turns out I’m a Grand Reserve member (please, hold your applause), but there’s really no value to it that I’ve found. One of the few ‘perks’ I’ve seen recently is an invite to a complimentary wine tasting at my local Total Wine that is comprised of wines from France, Italy, and Spain.
I know. You’re super jealous. Probably even more so after I tell you that you can’t confirm the line up before attending…because it’s full of plonk you’ve never heard of, nor care to drink.
Despite my cynicism with the whole status thing, I am definitely a Total Wine fan. Good selection across the board (price points, regions, availability, etc) all at fair prices…especially when you wait for the 20% off coupon to hit (which is pretty much the only time I buy unless I’m in a pinch/buying for a client gift/etc).
The advantage of Grand Reserve status, as I understand it, is access to highly in demand bourbons.
That is about all I expect to get out of it. I couldn’t care less about them for drinking, but for trading chips…
Ahhh, gotcha! That makes sense, but i wonder of that varies by region as well.
In AZ this last year they initially sent out some sort of Poppy offer, but then essentially retracted it. Anyone remember that happening anywhere else?
In 2015-2016 the Pappy offer in AZ was essentially a race to the store up on Camelback. I got a bottle both years. This past year they moved online for the entire state and had some website issues. There was an initial offering where the website went down then a followup. I missed out this year though. Occasionally I also have gotten a coupon for a free bottle of wine to try or a 20$ bottle of my choice for 1 cent (which can be stacked with current specials). All in all the highest value is in the bourbon offerings.
Thanks Andrew - I remembered there was some sort of online issue.
Will be interesting to see what they do this year
Apparently there are a lot of Pappy fakes out there:
Total Wine ended up rolling out what I called the “Pappy/BTAC dash” on a regional basis. I lucked out and snagged a bottle of the Pappy 23 year, which I was finally able to pick up in store last week.
Unless they spend a bunch of money on improving their ecommerce capabilities, they’ll probably stick with the region by region rollout of the allocated bourbon. Hopefully for the higher population states, they might consider doing those individually instead of lumping them in with other states.