Has it ever happened to you?
You spend months planning your trip to wine country. You work all your contacts to arrange tastings at the best wineries. You spend thousands on flights, hotels, ground transportation, etc. When you finally get to that amazing winery, they show you the terroir, explain why they chose that clone, hired the best vineyard management firm, and the best winemaker. They discuss the perfect brix level for harvest at 4AM. They show you the tanks, the fermentation, the best barrels, the caves that keep it all at the perfect temperature. They even show you the best available corks used to keep the bottles perfect for years. The wine is magical, and everything you had hoped for when planning your trip.
You place your order and pay for the wine. Of course, if the weather is too hot or too cold, they won’t ship your wine to you for months. But they will keep it stored perfectly until shipping. When it’s finally “safe” to ship, they surround the bottles in extensive packaging and hand it off to a “common” carrier who takes your wine through the same process as every other package they ship. Finally, some hard-working sweaty individual in a hot truck leaves it on your front porch in the sun so you can carry the 40 pound bulky box(es) inside before the heat or porch pirates get to it first. Can you still taste the terroir and all the incredibly painstaking details the winery took to make the perfect wine? Do you have confidence that if you cellar it for 10 or 20 years it will be an amazing bottle?
Common carriers deliver millions of packages every day. To do so, they handle every box the same way, whether it is copier paper, auto parts, or your fine wine. Wineries spend extra on packaging to protect the wine from rough handling and temperature extremes. They also pay the carriers extra to move the wine faster so the carrier has less time to damage the wine! And you still receive boxes that are hot, covered in black marks, and crumbled Styrofoam that gets
into every corner of the room where you opened the box. We don’t think this makes sense. It’s time for a better idea.
Vine Vault is changing the paradigm of fine wine delivery. We protect wine from extreme temperatures and rough handling while protecting the environment from excessive, harmful packaging and jet fuel. And we do it in a way that puts the joy back into buying and laying down fine wine. How is our process different?
BETTER LOGISTICS
Every Vine Vault facility and vehicle is temperature controlled to ensure your wine stays at a safe temperature during transit. We keep your wine around a glorious 55 degrees – far away from temperatures that can “cook” or freeze your wine. This allows your wine to arrive at your cellar in the same pristine condition as when it left the winery. You can cellar the wine with the comfort of knowing it has been handled with the care it deserves and even more importantly, share it with friends and loved ones with confidence.
Every box has a unique bar-coded tracking number that allows us to ensure the right package is delivered to its rightful owner. While our process takes longer than traditional carriers, we know where your package is in our process and that it remains at an awesome temperature.
ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY, MINIMALIST PACKAGING
Since our logistics eliminate temperature variation and rough handling, there is a lot less protection required. That helps the environment and costs less. Imagine receiving a three-pack in an OWC (wooden box). Traditionally, that wooden box comes packed in a much larger cardboard box, usually packed with foam to cushion the wine in the wooden box from all the rough handling. Since the foam is usually glued to the cardboard, all of it ends up in the landfill after clogging up your trash can for a week. With Vine Vault, we simply put the wooden box
inside a clear plastic bag that has the shipping label on it. When the wine is delivered to you, just remove the bag and put it in the recycling bin. That’s better for you, and for your grandkids’ grandkids.
For wine not packed in OWC, we like to pack it in a sturdy cardboard box. Since our process eliminates the rough handling and the exposure to extreme temperatures, crumbly Styrofoam and dusty pulp liners are no longer required. After unpacking the wine, just cut the tape, fold the box, and put it in the recycling bin. Our boxes are even made from 40% - 60% recycled cardboard. Since these are the same boxes we use to move and store wine, many customers like to keep them to use in their cellar.
A FOCUSED PROFESSIONAL TEAM
Our team doesn’t know much about delivering copier paper or auto parts. That’s because we focus on delivering fine wine. Our drivers have gone through rigorous training, are usually managed by a Sommelier, and many of them are actually studying about wine in their free time. Our drivers also pack up wine collections that we are moving across the country, and they assist our Sommeliers with our full-service wine storage. In other words, they are experts in handling wine. So much so, they regularly handle boxes of wine worth thousands and thousands of dollars.
Our team is made up of honest, friendly people that are eager to delight our clients. Several of our drivers have been promoted to logistics managers, facility managers, and even our national events manager who plans awesome wine tasting events all around the country.
OUR PROCESS
Once we have your wine ready for shipment at our Napa facility, we will send you an email identifying the winery and order number and letting you know the wine is about to leave Napa. The email will give you a rough idea of when to expect your wine. This is a good time to let us know if you are going to be traveling around the expected delivery time so that we may plan accordingly. Would you like for us to hold this order for a bit and then deliver several orders all at once? No problem. We do it all the time. Do you want us to pick up a few other orders for you across Napa and Sonoma, we are happy to do this for you.
About a week to 10 days later, we will send you an email as the wine is about to arrive at our refrigerated facility near you. This email will confirm the address we will be visiting to deliver the wine.
Once we have the wine in our refrigerated facility near you, our area logistics manager will email you with a planned delivery date and 3-hour delivery window.
Our driver will text you about 30 minutes prior to their planned delivery time to let you know they are on their way. When the driver arrives, they will ring the doorbell and give you the wine. They are happy to carry the box(es) to the cellar to save you the trouble. The driver will require the signature of an adult to leave the wine as this is required by law. We do not allow our driver to leave on the front porch without an adult being present. We will not deliver the wine to a minor. And the funny part of the state law is that we cannot deliver to a person who is intoxicated. So watch
the day drinking on delivery day!
If for some reason our driver cannot connect with you to deliver the wine, your wine stays in a refrigerated truck until it returns to our refrigerated warehouse. Our logistics manager will reach out to you to reschedule the delivery. We deliver over 97% of the boxes on the first attempt, and we want to keep it this way as making two trips is not efficient and is bad for the environment.
You receive your wine in pristine condition without all the hassles and worry that come with traditional shipping methods. We make collecting wine a joy!