For my dad, that’s probably whatever box wine Costco has on sale. That’s fine, but not really my cup of tea if you know what I mean, no matter how much I like Bronco Wine Company or Franzia.

For my wife and I, it’s probably a reasonably priced bottle from a recent vintage available winery direct, or as part of one of my clubs.

For my business partner a wine of the month is probably something he bought a decade ago and has stored for and meticulously cared for in the time since.

I think we can all guess who is drinking the highest quality wine, but overall I’m sure we can all be happy with our choices. Lastly, if you’re looking to have some wine delivered straight to your front door, I hope you give my monthly wine club a try.

If so, finding a quality wine of the month club might be a good fit for you to not only learn about wine, but also to have some truly outstanding wine delivered to your home or your office.

At it’s core, any good wine of the month club serves two general purposes. To start, they ship quality wines which you either wouldn’t have access to locally, or are available at local stores in such small amounts that you wouldn’t be likely to ever try the wines.

Secondly, a good wine of the month club is going to educate its members. Wine education is a funny thing since so few people can truly tell the difference between good and great wine, but that doesn’t mean it is an unimportant factor. Many wine clubs aim to give their customers enough information to make an informed decision about the relative quality of a wine based on the winery or vineyard location as well as the varietal. As an example, Pinot Noir does not grow well in warm climates.

While I can appreciate that every business (like every consumer) has the ability and certainly the right to make their own decisions about which products to include in their gift baskets, I always wonder when I see exactly the same wines included in gift basket after gift basket. How is that providing value and adding a level of interest for your customers?

I might be biased, but I think we’ve done an outstanding job with our gift baskets at Uncorked Ventures. Yes, we’re at the upper end of the price spectrum, but the quality of products are consistent with that. Personally, I’d rather receive good value while paying a bit more rather than paying less and getting wine and food which is available at my local grocery store.

Of course, for some people they want cheaper wine. That’s fine, but when you’re ready for better wine we’re sure you’ll be back. No one else is shipping the equivalent of the 95 point and 93 point bottles which we included in our Special Selections shipment this month.

On the wine, simply continuing to grow our customer base as well as continuing to build relationships with wineries and vineyard owners will do the trick over time.

For customers though, especially corporate customers we wanted to have a more significant offer than our wine clubs. The answer there is our gift basket program which really should be called our luxury gift baskets because we aren’t shipping bad wine and we aren’t shipping inferior products. Everything that goes into our baskets is absolutely incredible quality…..as you can tell, I’m incredibly proud of what we’re offering.

Give our gift baskets a look!

Today one thing caught my attention in the sports world (and no it isn’t the fact that my home town Padres are set to deal 3-4 pieces after never being able to overcome a terrible April, or the fact that the Lakers were swept out of the playoffs which is especially distressful because they are the only big market team I can cheer for) which was Yao Ming retiring.

I’ll also remember the Yo-Yao commercials from Nike which were classic, but the man himself always seemed to have a sense, at least from afar that his presence as the first foreigner picked #1 in the NBA draft was larger than himself.

A short piece over at ESPN confirms. Yao will always be one of those guys I remember playing simply because his skill set didn’t match my expectations. I never thought I’d see someone of that height shoot 80%+ from the free throw line or be able to step out to 20 feet to make jump shots without acting afraid of the paint. He was a special player and one of the few I’d make a point to watch at some point during every NBA season.

Lastly, for a company interested in doing business overseas…..his success marketing himself, clearly with plenty of help, is something we can look toward with hope for the future.