When I started Celebrations Wine Club about 18 years ago with direct mail marketing, a friend said, “You should have a website.” I replied, “What’s that?” “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll put one up for you.” Soon after, we added a primitive shopping cart. But back in the past, people didn’t trust shopping carts or the businesses they were attached to. We took most orders with the old technology, a phone attached to a wire. I was on the phone continuously, taking orders, defending the business. “No, we’re not tricksters or imposters. We’re really a wine-of-the-month club, and if we bill your credit card, you really will receive the wine that you ordered.”
Today, I rarely talk on the phone. Orders come in from the website, and the only people who might call to place an order or vet the company are likely to be older people, who continue to be skeptical of this technology. Young people, on the other hand, totally trust the internet, maybe too much so, but that’s another argument whose resolution is yet to come. They own it and all of its offshoots, emailing, texting, and tweeting. They buy online. They bank online. They socialize online. They work online. And they over-throw governments online.
We have recently connected our website to our United Parcel Service program. U.P.S. will now email tracking numbers to those who have ordered from our website, and these Club members can follow the route of their packages on the U.P.S. website and anticipate the delivery date if they are so inclined. But those who placed phone orders or ordered from older versions of our website, won’t automatically receive this information, although it’s only an email away. Simply email celebrate@celebrationswineclub.com with the request so that we can put your email address into the U.P.S. program that generates your label.
If you are receiving a gift that friends or family members ordered for you online, they will receive the tracking number. You might ask them to forward the email to you. If you enrolled yourself, then you will receive the tracking number when it is issued. And for those of you who appreciate surprises, be assured that your packages will arrive without notification at the same time as the others who monitored the route. And you are always welcome to call me at 800-700-6227 if you’d like me to track a package.
How Wine Shipments Were Tracked
A tracking number is created at the moment a shipping label is generated, which is usually a day or two before the box physically moves. From there the number accumulates scans at each handoff, and the delivery estimate tightens as the package reaches the final sorting hub. The early scans say more about the shipper’s schedule than about when the wine will arrive.
That is why the tracking email described above was worth having. Knowing the approximate delivery date let a member arrange for somebody to be home, since alcohol shipments required an adult signature and could not be left at a door. Without the number, the first notice was a tag on the door.
Why Wine Shipments Were Different
Ordinary parcels can be released without a signature at the recipient’s instruction, and wine could not. Carriers ran separate alcohol programs with their own agreements, labeling, and driver instructions, and shippers needed permits from the states they shipped into. Volume limits and reporting requirements varied from one state to another.
Temperature added a second layer. Wine left in a hot vehicle can expand past its cork, so shippers clustered deliveries in spring and fall, watched heat waves, and offered insulated packing or refrigerated service in summer. The practical result was that wine shipping followed the weather more closely than most retail categories.
| Consideration | Placed by telephone | Placed through the website |
|---|---|---|
| Address record | Written down during the call | Entered by the customer |
| Email on file | Only if the caller gave one | Required at checkout |
| Automatic tracking notice | No, unless added manually | Yes |
| Gift shipments | Notice went to the giver | Notice went to the giver |
| Correcting an address | A second phone call | An account update |
The Broader Shift This Newsletter Describes
The suspicion of online ordering described above was ordinary in the first decade of the web, when payment security was genuinely uneven and small merchants had no established reputation online. Trust arrived gradually, through familiar payment processors, visible return policies, and the plain accumulation of successful transactions. The generational split the column notes was real and temporary.
The scale of that change is documented in the Census Bureau’s quarterly e-commerce retail sales data, which has tracked online sales as a share of total retail since the late 1990s. Wine was a late entrant to that shift precisely because of the signature and permit requirements. What looked like customer reluctance was often regulatory friction.
Gift Shipments and Their Particular Problems
A gift shipment splits the transaction across two households, which creates a predictable set of complications. The buyer holds the tracking information, the recipient holds the door, and neither automatically knows the other’s schedule. Forwarding the tracking email, as this newsletter suggests, solved most of it.
The other recurring issue was the surprise element. A recipient who does not know a delivery is coming cannot arrange to be there, and an unexpected shipment requiring a signature is the least convenient kind of present. Telling the recipient in advance costs a little surprise and saves a week of missed attempts.
Addresses, Apartments, and Small Details
Most delivery problems traced back to the address rather than to the carrier. Missing unit numbers, gated communities, business names that did not match the building directory, and post office boxes, which carriers cannot use for alcohol, accounted for a large share of failed attempts. A correct, complete address supplied at the outset prevented nearly all of them.
Apartment buildings created their own version of the problem, since a front desk that accepts parcels may not be permitted to sign for alcohol. Where that was the case, redirecting to a workplace or a carrier location was the reliable answer. None of this was visible in the tracking history until the first attempt failed.
What Remains of This Now
Celebrations Wine Club shipped for twenty-five years and stopped shipping in December 2019, so the tracking arrangements, phone number, and ordering instructions above describe how the club worked at the time rather than any current service. The newsletters were where that housekeeping lived, alongside tasting notes and regional features. The full run sits in the newsletter archive, and the club’s own account of its operation is in the history of the club.
Read now, the piece is a small record of a business learning the internet in public. The wine it describes was the same wine either way, as the material in the wine for celebrations guide still reflects.
Wine Shipping FAQ
Why did tracking sometimes show no movement for days?
Because a label had been created but the package had not yet entered the carrier’s network, or because it was in transit between hubs without an intermediate scan. Long-haul legs often produce no updates at all. Movement resumed at the next sorting facility.
Could a delivery date be chosen in advance?
Not usually at the outset, though carriers allowed a delivery to be rescheduled once the package was in their network. The reference number on a door tag was the fastest route to that. Holding a package at a carrier location was the other option.
What happened after three failed delivery attempts?
The package was returned to the shipper, which for wine meant a long round trip in a vehicle at unknown temperatures. Redirecting after the first missed attempt avoided that. It was the main reason the newsletter above urged people to read the door tag.