Leon and Sons’ Wine Club Is the Only Kind of Club I’ll Join

This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.

I wasn’t really into extracurriculars in high school. I did drama club, but I was always begrudgingly cast as a member of the chorus or a nameless townsperson. And I was in the environmental club, but we met...like three times a year. Now I’m a little different. I have a club I’m very invested in. It’s called Leon Circle and it’s a wine club from Leon and Sons, a small, natural wine–focused shop in Brooklyn.

When people ask me how to “get into wine,” I tell them to just open a bottle of wine and drink it. “But where do I start? How do I know which grapes taste like what or which regions matter?" With Leon Circle’s wine club, you don’t have to worry about that. Owner Chris Leon chooses three bottles of wine per month for $75 and ships nationally. (Or you can pick them up from his Clinton Hill shop, if you live in Brooklyn like me.) The selections range from producers all over the world, even countries like Hungary or Georgia, which have been making wine, like those skin-contact ones you can’t get enough of, for thousands of years. Helpful tasting notes about the grapes, soil types, regional climates—the real nerdy stuff that’s actually going to teach you about what you like and don’t like—come conveniently stowed in your cute little wine briefcase. And if you’re afraid of commitment, you can drop in or out of the club as you please (much like I did with drama club after my junior year of high school), so it makes a good one-time gift for that friend or loved one who follows the entire BA staff on Instagram and can’t get enough of our shots of natty bottles.

So like I said before, the best way to get into wine is to try wine, and Leon Circle makes it easy. It’s the only club I’ll enthusiastically stick around for.

Buy it: Leon Circle Wine Club

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit