pop & pour

By Peter Vetsch

[This bottle was provided as a sample for review purposes.]

It’s been a little over a year since we featured a wine from Cellar Direct on PnP, and in the meantime the first pan-Canadian artisanal wine club has been busy behind the scenes, preparing its next suite of offers and tweaking its approach in order to maximize buying efficiency and aim for the best of both worlds in the online wine purchasing sphere:  time-limited features and repeat buying capability.  Once a week, on Saturday, Cellar Direct will release a new offer on its website and to its mailing list.  Offered bottles are available in multiples of 3 and can be shipped across Canada, with any such transport taking place in temperature-controlled trucks to avoid any damage to the wines in transit due to extreme heat or cold.  Full case purchases of a single wine attract discounts off the standard offer price and the most effective shipping rates, but buyers can also accumulate 3-packs or 6-packs of different wines and have them shipped together.  Once an offer week comes to an end, any remaining bottles left over from the offer can still be purchased from the online shop at Cellar Direct’s website, so if a particular order bowls you over, there may be a chance to get more.  Did I mention they ship across Canada?  Readers in government liquor monopoly provinces, take note — this is your chance at freedom.

The first of Cellar Direct’s new offers dropped today, and to mark the occasion we are bringing you a contemporaneous review of the bottle now available for online purchase everywhere in the country.  We will be doing the same thing over the next five Saturdays (yes, even through Wine Advent, because we’re crazy), so feel free to check out our notes on the weekly wine to assist in your buying decisions.  The inaugural Cellar Direct release of this new offer season is one that rang a few distant bells, but it took some digging through the Pop & Pour archives to find out why. Read the rest of this entry »