A wine club member who left over an industry discount, kept buying the wine for two years, and rejoined in 2026. Smith Story Wine Cellars, Healdsburg, and what retention data does not measure.
Disclosure: I have known Ali and Eric Story since they opened at Bacchus Landing, I count them as friends, and Lori and I belong to the twelve-bottle Collector Club. We also belong to Baldassari Wines and Bacigalupi, and are on the allocation list at Croix Estate, all named below. I am in the wine trade myself now and do not ask for the industry rate. Nothing here was solicited and nothing was provided for this piece.
The dog reached me before anyone had said a word.
He came across the room at a run, and Ali and Eric were already calling him back, the way owners do when they think a stranger is about to be inconvenienced. I waved them off. Sandwich had read the situation correctly. I have never been able to leave a dog alone in a room, and he knew it before I gave him anything to go on.
This was Bacchus Landing, a few months after they moved down from Anderson Valley. What I did not know, standing there, was that Ali was in the middle of the hardest year she has had. Four surgeries. Twenty weeks of chemotherapy. She opened that tasting room through all of it, and part of the reason it sat in Healdsburg rather than out in Philo was that Healdsburg put her closer to her medical team.
She wrote about it the whole time. Not in a press release. On Instagram, in the dog’s voice, in among the butter and the pizza crusts, alongside the porch deliveries she drove herself during the pandemic. She has said she does not want the illness to be the badge people know her by. She has also said it is part of their story. She made a wine out of it and called it BRAVE, a carbonic Syrah produced during treatment. They are still making it.
None of that was on the tasting sheet. I learned it the way anyone learns anything about the Storys, which is by standing in the room while they talk.
We joined the club.
Then we let it lapse.
Nothing went wrong. No shipment arrived broken, nobody was rude, the wine did not slip. We were cutting back on clubs generally, and Lori was working at Williams Selyem then, which came with an industry discount. Every benefit we were paying dues to receive, she already had, at more wineries than we belonged to. The arithmetic did the rest, and it had nothing to do with Smith Story.
A discount is the most replaceable thing a club owns. Everybody in the trade has one. So does anyone with a friend in the trade, or a standing relationship with a good shop. A membership whose value collapses the moment a discount turns up from somewhere else was never selling anything else. The clubs that survived our cutback survived because they offered something the industry rate could not reproduce, and what that turned out to be was access to the people who made the wine.
The cost cutting was the trigger. It did not decide the order. When we sat down and worked out which memberships to keep, the ones that went first were the ones where I could not name a person and could not repeat a story. Handsome labels, competent wine, nothing underneath. Croix Estate never entered the conversation, because Croix is an allocation rather than a club, and an allocation asks a different question of a household.
Smith Story had a person and a story and got cut anyway, because by that point I was running a spreadsheet instead of thinking. The list came down to three or four.
I kept buying the wine the whole time we were not members.
Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 direct-to-consumer report put average wine club acquisition at 26 percent against attrition of 22 percent, which leaves membership at most wineries close to where it started. For a couple of those years I sat in the attrition column. I was also still ordering. Whatever that number was measuring, it was not measuring whether I had gone.
Then Lori left the wine trade, and the discount left with her.
The list started growing back. It stands at ten or eleven now, and there is a rule underneath it, though nobody sat down and wrote one. Two things get a winery added. It has to fill a gap in what we actually drink, a varietal or a region we are thin on. And it has to arrive with a story worth repeating.
Exceptions run in one direction. A story good enough will get a winery onto the list without filling any gap at all. Filling a gap has never been enough on its own.
Inside those ten or eleven there was a smaller group that never came up for review. Three of them. Baldassari. Bacigalupi. Croix Estate. Small houses where the owners are on the floor and the story attached to the bottle was not written by an agency.
Sitting in a new house in Reno, four hours from Sonoma County, going through what we had, I could see the shape of the hole. Smith Story cleared both tests and had cleared them the whole time. It was missing from a list it had never stopped belonging on.
So we rejoined.
Leaving was a mistake. It did not feel like one. It felt like arithmetic.
The rejoining had nothing to do with a benefit. The discount had already proved worthless to us, and we came back at twelve bottles, which is not the move of a household hunting for value. It had nothing to do with consulting either. I would take that work in a heartbeat if it were ever on the table, and it has no bearing on why we are members or why we are friends.
We rejoined because a list of the wineries a household belongs to is, whether anyone intends it that way, a list of who that household is.
Smith Story went onto the group that never comes up for review. That group is four now.
Are there better wines than theirs. Probably. The question has never come up in our house.
What wine club retention data misses
Every win-back campaign I have seen is built on the assumption that a lapsed member left over something, and that the something can be fixed with an offer. A discount on rejoining. A free shipping window. A survey asking what went wrong.
We left over a discount, and no discount would have brought us back. The rate is what made the membership redundant. Price was never going to make it necessary again. What brought me back was a rule I did not know I was running until I looked at the list and found a name that should have been on it.
People ask which clubs we belong to. They ask more often than anyone in the trade would guess. Four names come out first, every time, and they come out with a story attached, because I can say why that wine is in the house without reaching for anything. A membership list is a poor thing to show off. Being able to explain why a bottle matters is a different proposition entirely.
The other six or seven have never come up in that conversation. The wine is good. There is nothing I can say about it.
The dog was the front door to that business for years, and nobody scripted, briefed, scheduled or held him to a standard. Most wineries would never permit an ungoverned thing at the center of the brand. They hire for polish and audit the flight, and then wonder why a competent room is a forgettable one.
The publisher of Wine Dogs California put Sandwich on the cover three times, in 2017, 2019 and 2023. We bought a copy at their shop the year we first joined. It is on the coffee table in Sparks, next to the Wine Bible, four hours from Healdsburg.
Sandwich died on February 10. He was thirteen.
Two days later a post went up, written in his voice, addressed to Sir Royal Soup, the younger Goldendoodle who is in the room now. How to angle for extra treats. Why a long tail and a wine glass on a low table are a poor combination. Then the practical part, the reason any of it ever mattered: “Make sure they buy wine though, this is how the humans pay the bills!”
Soup will not be Sandwich. The seventy thousand people who followed that account were never following a dog.
I was back in May, standing in that room three months after the letter went up, and that is when we rejoined. Months go by between our visits. Nothing needs rebuilding when we walk in. The conversation picks up where it stopped.
Other memberships will rotate in and out over the years. That one does not.
Field Notes
Wine club retention figures cited here come from Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report
Smith Story Wine Cellars , Bacchus Landing, Healdsburg. Founded in 2013 by Ali Smith Story and Eric Story, who met working at K&L Wine Merchants. Funded on Kickstarter in 2014 under the name Farmers First, against a goal of twenty-five thousand dollars, fully backed in thirty days by a hundred and fifty supporters, and by their own account the first American winery brought up that way. Fruit from Anderson Valley, the Sonoma Coast, Russian River Valley, Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County and Germany. Socks for Sandwich has given away more than sixty thousand pairs. Lord Sandwich appeared on the cover of Wine Dogs California, by Craig McGill and Susan Elliott, in 2017, 2019 and 2023.
Patrick R. Dunn is the founder of Vianarra , a hospitality storytelling practice working with winery owners, tasting room managers, and boutique hotel GMs. He spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger across six sites and is WSET Level 3 certified. He writes weekly at newsletter.vianarra.com.