QPR wine club

The other day I was reacquainted with the California Wine Club, a cataloger of artisan California wines. While most of their inventory is, um, underwhelming, they do fill an important niche in wine marketing, one that I would like to emulate.

For my catalog I'd put together an evolving list of affordable wines from . . . wherever . . . and market them to adventurous, value-minded consumers without all the tired cliches and filler one typically sees in direct-to-consumer efforts.

Turns out, the concept for this venture has been right under my nose for years: QPRwines.

My friend Neil Monnens publishes a wine buying guide that groups wines by their rating, lists them by price, and then ranks them by value. The ranking is effectively the wine's "quality-to-price ratio." Hence QPR.

We've seen "bang for the buck" wines before but, until Neil wrapped his spreadsheet around it, nobody had ever pursued such a rigorous and wide-ranging analysis. Each issue (he puts out 18 a year) profiles a different varital, with all the recent vintages included.

So, for example, you might see an issue devoted to West Coast Pinot Noirs with all the 90-point wines grouped together, each one listed in ascending order of price. (The point score is an average of at least three major critic's -- you know who they are -- and the price is the lowest retail price he finds at wine-searcher.) From this list of 90-point Pinots, Neil find the average price, homing in on those that cost less than half.

These are the Value wines. The very same wines I would want in my catalog. Hell, the same wines I would want in my cellar.

The catalog would let people choose whatever varietals interest them for quarterly or bi-monthly shipments of high QPR wines. If each shipment had two wines, ideally one would be under $20, the other under, say $50. Naturally, a free subscritpion would be included.

I can't wait to see what Neil thinks . . .