This is a (lengthy) review of my participation with Bottlenotes, a new wine club service.

I received an e-mail in September regarding a new wine club service called Bottlenotes. I was asked to consider participating in their Bloggernotes program, which provides select Bloggers an opportunity to try the Bottlenotes service in exchange for providing feedback that will be used to improve the service. While it was hoped that participants would love the service so much that we would write about Bottlenotes, it was not a requirement of the program. In the full interest of disclosure, I was provided with a free one-month subscription to try out the service. My participation with the program is still ongoing, but I thought I would begin with some preliminary feedback.

Bottlenotes prides itself on being a different kind of wine club, with several club options available to meet a wide variety of interests. These include the "Little Black Dress Club" aimed at female consumers, Explorers Club, Dinner Party Club, and the Kosher Wine Club, among others. They also tout the ability to match user preferences with wines, custom-selecting one’s wines to meet their tastes. They also sell wines separately from the clubs.

As another component of its service, club members’ wines are automatically listed in their online cellars, which permit them to track their wines and keep notes. They can also manually enter other wines not purchased through Bottlenotes. The service also permits you to view other members’ cellars. We use the stand-alone Cellar Tracker to accomplish this task, so this was less useful to me than it might be for others.

I choose to join their Limited Addictions Club, which offers limited production wines and is limited to 500 members. There was a long delay between signing up and receiving the wine, but club members finally received the just released Diamond Creek Diamond Valley 2005, which retails for $175.00. Accordingly, the two bottle/month shipment was reduced to the single bottle as this club costs $200.00/2-bottle shipment.

I haven’t spent a considerable time browsing through their selection, but in general, it looked to be quite good. However, I have been a little disappointed in their service, which is a change from my initial interactions with the company. When I first signed up for the Club, I was supposed to enter an access code, which somehow didn’t go through. Consequently, my credit card was charged, but before I could follow up with the company for a credit, they reached out to me letting me know that the credit had already been issued. I was quite impressed. Unfortunately, I have had uneven service since then.

The first issue has to do with my account, which somehow became co-mingled with my husband’s order, who is also participating in this market research project. We now have one account in my name, with his name listed in the "ship to" and "bill to" fields. We will accept some responsibility for this as he may have inadvertently logged into my account when submitting his own order. We honestly don’t know how this happened.

The next issue was the considerable delay from sign-up to order fulfillment. The sign-up occured in September, but the wine was not received until late October and there was limited, if any, correspondence from Bottlenotes regarding the order. In fact, I began to think that an error had occured with my account and followed up with them to inquire. At that point, the reason for the delay was explained. This bottle never showed up in my online cellar and had to be entered manually.

The following month, both my husband and I noticed charges on our credit card from Bottlenotes, in the amounts of each of our clubs (he joined the Explorers’ Club) depsite the fact that we had each signed up for a single shipment, not multiple shipments or ongoing memberships. We immediately logged into our account and suspended our memberships, not having seen this option previously. In addition, we sent an e-mail to Bottlenotes requesting that the orders be cancelled and charges refunded to our credit card. While we received two e-mails from Bottlenotes (clearly computer generated): 1) confirming our request to suspend our memberships and 2) asking us to please share our reasons for suspending membership with the company, we never received any response to our request to cancel the orders or receive a refund.

We chose not to pursue it and waited for our orders to arrive. My husband’s arrived a few weeks later. Mine never arrived, nor had I received a credit for the order until last week. On Friday, I sent a follow up request through the Customer Service page on their website. I received a response via e-mail the same day with apologies and the immediate issue of a credit. This has since shown up on my statement.

All in all, I have a mixed review for Bottlenotes. Their customer service was initially wonderful and then suffered a few gaps, returning to good service, so I would recommend them on that count. If you are interested in a wine of the month type club, this may be of interest as they do have a wide selection of choices. I buy too much wine already, plus I am generally shopping for something particular, so the club concept isn’t really for me. I did like the "exclusive" aspect of Limited Addictions, but in reality, these aren’t the wines I drink with much frequency.  Finally, the online cellar tracking is useful, but as I already have a system in place, it duplicates those efforts. However, I would recommend them overall if these features are of interest.