Well, by now you have all read the insert announcing that effective December 31st, 2019, Celebrations WIneclub will cease to exist in its current form. With annual escalations in shipping fees, warehouse costs, and general operating expenses, it just is simply no longer viable for a small company of our size to compete.
This was a hard decision to make and one we did not take lightly. For us, it is also a very sad announcement. We have come to know so many of you on a personal level and have enjoyed every minute of it. We think of you as our wine family.
Thank you for sharing your lives with us. I loved hearing about your vacations, weddings, new grandbabies, retirement plans, job promotions, moves, and other meaningful life events. We are blessed to have been allowed into your worlds.
Celebrations will still be here, but we are going to focus on the online wine store. We have many administrative things to do on the back end, but hope to have a robust, viable website up and running by February/March of 2020.
As I have many of your email addresses, I will let you know when it has been updated and reflects an updated site and the newest inventory.
I hope that you will continue to choose us for your wine needs, as we plan to continue offering boutique and smaller family owned vineyard selections that cannot be found in the corner store. We still plan on having some yummy, exciting wines to share with you.
Alexander Graham Bell said, “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
As sad as this day is for us, hopefully we can focus on the new door and see many of you on the other side.
May God richly bless your lives, keep you safe and healthy, and may 2020 bring you nothing but peace and joy.
Good Wining my Friends and Farewell,
Tere and Debra Williams
Celebrations Wine Club
What the archive holds now
Shipments ended on December 31, 2019, and what remains is the written record the club produced along the way. That record runs to hundreds of posts written between 2010 and 2019, covering the regions the club followed, the growers it visited, and the practical questions members asked most often. None of it has been rewritten, so it reads exactly as it did when it was published.
The material falls into a few natural groups. Monthly letters to members sit in the wine club newsletters, and the shorter pieces on wine news, history and technique sit in hot wine topics. Between them they form a fairly complete picture of a small California importer’s decade.
| Section | What it contains | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletters | Monthly letters written for members | Following the club month by month |
| Hot topics | Short pieces on news, history and technique | Browsing by subject |
| Region guides | Overviews of California and Italian growing areas | Understanding where a wine came from |
| Grape and style guides | What each variety does and why | Making sense of a label |
| Skills material | Serving, storing, tasting and pairing | Practical questions |
Why small shippers found it hard
The reasons given in this announcement were shared by many operations of a similar size at the end of the decade. Direct shipping costs rose year after year, temperature-controlled storage and seasonal shipping holds added expense, and compliance with a patchwork of state rules took administrative time that a small staff did not have. None of those pressures fell evenly on large and small companies.
Scale was the deciding factor. A large shipper spreads fixed costs across many thousands of cases, while a small one carries nearly the same regulatory and warehousing burden across a far smaller volume. The Wine Institute’s industry statistics give a sense of how concentrated California production became over the same period.
Reading the archive with the dates in mind
Everything here was written in its own moment, which is part of what makes it useful. A post about a harvest, a fire season or a change in the market records what was known at the time rather than what turned out to be true later. Reading with the publication date visible keeps that context in view.
A few things have naturally changed since. Wineries have been sold, tasting rooms have moved, and some producers named in older posts no longer operate under the same ownership. Anything time-sensitive is worth verifying against a current source before acting on it.
Where to start if the archive is new to you
Readers who came for the wine rather than the club history usually get the most from the reference material. The overviews of California’s wine regions give the geography for the western half of the story, and the grape and style guides explain what grows in each place. From there the monthly letters make far more sense, because they assume that background.
If you were a member, the newsletters are the closest thing to a diary of those years. They record which regions the club was following, which harvests worried growers, and what the people running a small operation were thinking as they went. Read chronologically, they tell a fairly complete story.
What a monthly shipment involved
Behind each month’s selection sat a long chain of work that members rarely saw. Wines had to be tasted and chosen months ahead, quantities committed to before demand was known, and cases moved into temperature-controlled storage until the shipping window opened. Summer heat and winter freezes both closed that window for weeks at a time.
Then came the paperwork. Every state set its own rules for what could be sent, in what quantity, with which permits and what tax reporting, and those rules changed often enough to need constant attention. A small staff handled all of it alongside the writing, the customer letters and the tasting notes that filled each newsletter.
The letters in the archive were written in the middle of that work, usually at the end of a long month. That is part of why they read the way they do, with harvest news, family updates and practical advice sitting side by side in the same page.
Keeping a written record intact
An archive is only useful if it stays readable, which is why none of the original posts have been altered. Spelling, phrasing and the occasional error all remain as published, because correcting them would quietly change what the record says. Anything added since sits below the original text rather than inside it.
That approach has a cost. Some posts refer to offers, deadlines and shipments that ended years ago, and a reader arriving from a search engine can mistake an old announcement for a current one. The publication date on each page is the safeguard, and it is worth glancing at before taking anything as present tense.
The value of leaving it alone is that the archive still shows how the wine trade looked from a small desk in California across a decade. Fire seasons, tariff news, harvest reports and glassware arguments all appear in the sequence they happened.
Archive FAQ
Is the wine club still operating?
No. Club shipments ended in December 2019, and the site exists now as a record of what was written during those years. Nothing described in the archive is available today.
Are the older posts still accurate?
The history, geography and technique hold up well, since none of that changes quickly. Details about specific businesses, staffing and availability were accurate when written and should be treated as of their date.
Who wrote the material?
It was written by the people who ran the club and by contributors who worked with them, including sommeliers and longtime members. The about page covers the history of the operation and the people behind it.