Decanting Club to launch with crowd funding

Decanting Club is a new online wine subscription club, which is currently looking to secure £17,000 through a crowd funding campaign.

The new club aims to send its subscribers a 150ml pouch of wine – one full glass – every week. Subscribers can then buy the wines in full bottles direct from Decanting Club if they wish. 

The wines sourced by Decanting Club will be unavailable at most UK supermarkets, off-licences and online retailers. The choices will be from “unexpected countries and made from less well-known grapes and groundbreaking production methods”.

Paul Rousou-Adams, founder of Decanting Club, says: “We’re inviting customers to back an exciting start-up at the very beginning of the journey. Decanting Club is for people who want to learn more about wine and experience new tastes. We know the expense, risk and health implications of doing this one whole bottle at a time can be a barrier. However, a single glass of wine is known to provide health benefits. So, a service that delivers wine in this way takes the risk out of the experiment. The wines we’ll select will be superior in quality to most supermarket wines and offer our customers excellent value for money.”

Using the free Decanting Club app, subscribers can learn more about the wines, read tasting notes and share their comments with other subscribers. Video presentations made by Decanting Club’s in-house wine expert will also feature on the app from time to time.

Asked about the logistics of the decanting wines into pouches, Paul Rousou-Adams told The Drinks Report:

“The key is that the decanting process needs to have a minimum of contact between wine and air. We open the bottles and reseal with a syringe-like device that can extract the wine 150ml at a time. This is then injected into the pouch, any excess air is pushed out, and then the pouch is heat-sealed.

“The packages are food safe and very strong to survive being posted.

“We have successfully conducted trials with the pouches. Each time we have compared the bottled wine with what comes out of the pouch after being posted. In blind tastes, there was no discernible difference between the two.

“The pouches are made by Moore & Buckle and the process takes place at our offices in Reading.”

For more information, visit http://decanting.club

26 November 2015 - Felicity Murray The Drinks Report, editor