Plonk Wine Club Review

Plonk Wine Club Review

In this review · Overview · Wine Review · Membership Benefits · Gift Review

We received this shipment from Plonk Wine Club in May, 2017.

There are a small handful of wine clubs out there designed for adventurous wine drinkers who want to expand their palates, and are willing to take a leap to try things they'd never otherwise get to try. Plonk is one of these wine clubs.

Few wine clubs offer, much less feature, organic and biodynamic wines. There are myriad reasons for this, including the fact that most wineries are organic or biodynamic because it's good agricultural sense, even if they're not certified or promoting it.

Plonk Wine Review

Plonk wine clubs focus on excellent wines at [what the industry considers] affordable prices. There are cheaper wine clubs, and there are wine clubs that offer more expensive wines, but few other wine subscriptions deliver this type of quality for less than $30 a bottle.

Proprietor Etty Lewensztain is a certified sommelier recognized for her ability to pick great wines. Accolades hale from Wine Enthusiast magazine, Wine & Spirits magazine, Food & Wine magazine and a host of other media sources. We frequently see picks in the Plonk Wine Club that go on to critical acclaim and praise and so we trust her curation 100%.

While we don't receive as many shipments of Plonk wine as we do other clubs, we've certainly sampled enough over the last 11 years to know the consistency is terrific and the wines are clever selection of unusual and high-quality grapes and regions.

Some notes from a Plonk shipment:

We tried the Scholium Project wine first. This is among the most interesting wines we've ever tried. The story behind this winery is fascinating, and Etty's willingness to showcase such brave winemaking moves in her wine club tells us as much about her, and her philosophy of wine-drinking, as it does about the mad scientist behind the Scholium Project.

When we first poured the wine, we couldn't help but notice the color—a pale salmon color, usually reserved for luscious rose wines from Provence, due to a small amount of intentional oxidization. At cooler-than-room-temp, the wine exhibits a bright palate, and amazingly a nutty aftertaste. Almost like Sherry, but much lighter than Sherry.

We decided to cool it down further and found, while the wine has unique properties that make it interesting to drink on its own, it was extremely food friendly. One day we had it with spinach and ricotta ravioli and the next chile verde chicken burritos and rice. It went beautifully with both, which might make this the most versatile pairing option you'll find after Champmagne.

Membership Benefits

Normally we're not big on "gift with purchase" as an incentive to join a wine club, as the free item is almost always junk. This is NOT the case with the free Plonk Corkscrew! We own a number of different styles of corkscrew, including other "professional waiter's corkscrews," but the think that really sets this one apart is the "double-jointed" support for opening on the bottle. Now every bottle gets opened without Herculean efforts (unless of course it's a solid rubber cork).

All members get a 10% discount on wines you love and reorder. Buy a case and also save 25% on your shipping costs.

Plonk Wine Club offers a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee: They'll refund you for any wines you don't love. That said, we'd be genuinely surprised and concerned if you receive plonk from Plonk.

The Plonk Wine Club is best known for its hands-on, highly personal, and very prompt customer service. Unlike other clubs, where you might get shifted to a call center in a far off country or an automated email queue, the owner of the Plonk Wine Club is always available — and loves to — to chat over the phone and exchange emails with members, like a personal wine concierge or sommelier.

If you need to hold your subscription for a vacation or want to cancel your membership you'll need to call and speak to someone during regular business hours. Basic online account management exists for tasks like changing your shipping address, updating your credit card, and extending your membership.

Plonk Wine Club Gifts

If you know an adventurous wine lover, buy them a subscription to the Plonk wine club and we promise you'll feel like the gifting champ of the year!

Giving this as a corporate gift? Plonk also offers a unique corporate gifting program called Corporate Corks where you can put whatever you want in the box with your business gifts.