II‘ve been a wine club member at a number of wineries over the years, which means I’ve stood in a lot of pickup party lines. The parties I remember best all had the same moment in them. A host recognized me, greeted me by name, and at some point went into the back and came out with an older vintage of a wine I’d loved. “I don’t have any more of this,” one of them told me, “but I wanted you to try it.” Bacigalupi does this well, and so do Baldassari and DeLaMontanya, and I’ve stayed in those clubs.

The other kind of pickup party runs all hands on deck. Everyone available gets pulled onto the floor for the day, and most of them don’t know the wines and don’t know the members. At one of those parties I asked the host what made this year’s release better than last year’s, and the host couldn’t answer, because nobody had passed along anything from the winemaker. I’ve walked away from those parties shaking my head, and more than once I’ve left the club before the next shipment went out.

I don’t have any more of this, but I wanted you to try it.

That gap matters more than most wineries treat it. Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report puts tasting rooms at 28 percent and wine clubs at 25 percent of the average winery’s revenue, and of every strategy the report tracked, wine club retention showed the strongest correlation with success. The fall pickup party is one of the few days a year a winery sees a large share of its club face to face.

Know who is coming before they arrive

A week out, pull the RSVP list and split it among the tasting room hosts. Each host learns their members from the club platform: when they joined, what they buy outside their shipments, and which wines they’ve gone back to more than once. A host who has done that homework can greet a member by name and ask about the wine they reordered last spring. Members who have gone quiet, the ones who stopped buying between shipments or stopped opening club emails, go to the most experienced hosts.

Get the vintage story from the winemaker before the party

Members ask what makes this year’s release different from last year’s, and a host can only answer with information from the winemaker. A week before the party, ask the winemaker for a few specific things about this vintage that aren’t on the tech sheet, like how the growing season went or what changed in the cellar, and make sure every host on the floor learns it well enough to tell it in their own words. The member already has the tasting notes, printed on the card in the box.

Hold back library bottles for specific members

Set aside a few bottles of older vintages for the party and match them to members who bought that wine when it was current. The allocation can be small. The host pours it for that member and says plainly that it’s the last of it. In my experience that single pour is what a member talks about on the drive home, and it costs the winery a handful of bottles from the library.

Keep the pour with the people who know the wines

If the day needs extra help, put the extra people on the case table and the parking lot. The greeting and the pour stay with hosts who know the release, can answer a question about the vintage, and know which members are standing in front of them. A full floor of people who can’t do that looks busy and tells members the club runs on autopilot. The same thinking applies to a crowded tasting room on any busy weekend.

Leave the discount out of the conversation

Geoffrey Moss MW analyzed transaction data from nine California wineries for his Master of Wine research and found that club discounts marginally increase the likelihood of termination, and that the likelihood rises as the cost of a club shipment rises. A coupon or an upgrade pitch at the pickup table puts price in front of a member on the day they’re quietly deciding whether the club is still worth it. Asking what they opened from the last shipment, and who they opened it with, keeps the conversation on the wine and tells the host far more.

Make room for members who are buying less

A member’s circumstances can change over the years they belong to a club. People retire, move onto fixed incomes, or have less to spend than they did when they signed up, and a member can love the wine as much as ever and still not afford the same shipment. Moss’s finding that termination rises with shipment cost applies directly here, since a member in that position is often one shipment away from canceling.

Hosts should never remark on a member buying less than they used to. A comment about a smaller order, even a friendly one, is the kind of thing a member remembers on the drive home. A winery can also give those members a way to stay, with a smaller shipment option or a senior club rate set at the same level as the discount it already gives people who work in the wine industry. A standing rate like that is different from a coupon pitched at the pickup table, because the member never has to ask for it.

Members who leave a pickup party disappointed rarely say so at the case table. They cancel a few weeks later, and the cancellation report never records what happened at the party.

Sources: Silicon Valley Bank, 2026 State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report; Geoffrey Moss MW, “Wine Club Retention,” Outshinery.