Another high-end wine club: Michael Mina Wine Club for food-friendly wines

It’s officially a trend. A few days ago Les Marchands Wine Bar & Merchant in Santa Barbara launched its SOMM Series Wine Club for highly allocated wines. And now Michael Mina and his longtime wine director and sommelier Rajat Parr have started their own high-end wine club called — what else? — the Michael Mina Wine Club.

Since Mina owns 18 restaurants across the country, the idea is to offer members bottles from the wine lists of Mina’s restaurants, thereby giving members access to hard-to-find wines from small producers around the world.

Who’s picking, or rather, curating the wines? Parr and his team of sommeliers. In a statement, Mina says, “There’s a movement among wine drinkers away from high-octane, overly ripe wines, and toward the kinds of wines we serve in my restaurants: bright, balanced bottles made to complement food.”

And those are exactly the kinds of wines members of the Michael Mina Wine Club will expect to have delivered to their doorsteps. No special club hats, though. Parr is also adding to the mix additional hand-crafted wines from around the world chosen for their food friendliness. And to that end, each wine comes with a recipe from one of Mina’s restaurants if members want to play restaurant at home.

Membership to the club includes four shipments of six bottles per year, spaced three months apart. The Hidden Gems level costs $120 per shipment (average bottle cost $20), while the Wines of Consequence (presumably pitched toward captains of industry and other deep-pocketed sorts) is $300 per shipment (average bottle cost $50). Join by Sept. 29 to get 25% off the first shipment. Go to the club’s site to see the exact wines in that first shipment.

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