Would You Spend $15,600 for a Wine Club Subscription?
Wine clubs are a fun idea: you get surprised with a curated selection of wines every so often without having to do the work of choosing it. Sometimes, it's even for a good cause—for example, NPR's wine club gives you 15 bottles for $80—that's $5.33 a bottle, a total steal!—and that's to keep public radio on the air.
On the other end of the wine club spectrum, the Acker Wine Club, from the Acker, Merrall & Condit wine merchants, costs $15,600 per year—for 12 bottles of wine per quarter. Yep, that's 48 bottles of wine, which comes out to $325 each.
Acker, Merall & Condit previously launched another wine club that never really took off. The company's chairman, John Kapon, told the New York Post, "It became a wine of the month or one of those other clubs. It didn't have the heart and soul of the company, which is me."
The current Acker Wine Club features multiple tiers of membership and different options for how much wine you're buying (you can browse and order from them here). At the lowest price point, you can buy one $30 bottle per month for a minimum of 12 months, amounting to $360. That's still more than most wine clubs, though it's only the entry level membership.
Meanwhile, at the highest end, above the Grand Cru club, is the JK Club. Why JK? Because it's named for John Kapon, the company's chairman and the selector of the wines. This is the one that costs $15,600 ($3,900 per quarter). The wines are described on the site as "the most respected and coveted wines in existence."
Other things you could buy with $15,600? A used car. 7,800 cups of coffee. 41 nights at the Soho Grand Hotel. A year of full-price tuition as an in-state student at a public university. 30 flights to Paris and back. 780 bottles of $20 wine. Or maybe even 1,560 bottles of $10 wine.
