Every time we look at the page for this wine club at Wine.com, we start drooling... and not just because Eric Ripert is so charming. Imagining the recipes that accompany special wine selections for this wine club gets our inner-gourmands excited and ready to head out for dinner!

While most wine clubs offer you a recipe pairing suggestion, no other club has a world-class chef and sommelier team choosing the wines and recipes to go with them. If you have never heard of Eric Ripert all you really need to know about his qualifications to pair his sommelier’s wines with amazing recipes is that his New York City restaurant Le Bernardin has three Michelin stars (an extraordinarily difficult rating to attain).

A note about wine and food pairings: Most people with an experienced palate for both food and wine will talk about the importance of pairing the right foods with the right wines because it elevates each to be better than they are on their own. Most non-foodie consumers look for more rule-based food-and-wine pairing suggestions because of their limited knowledge. Some of these “rules” you might know are white wines with cheese, chicken, and fish; red wines with meat. In reality, the more you understand which flavor profiles go well together (sweet wines with salty snacks, bright whites with lighter fish or summery dishes, spicy and fruity reds with minimally-prepared cuts of steak, cherry-bomb Pinot Noirs with salmon, robust Zinfandels with BBQ, etc.) the more you can do this for yourself. Except that you’ll probably never be as good at as Eric Ripert & Aldo Sohm, so why not let them do it for you?

Wine.com wine clubs have tools for gift-giving:

• If you’re giving this wine club subscription as a last-minute gift, they have a template you can customize and print on your home computer so you have something to present to the recipient on the occasion you’re gifting.
• Gift recipient email address (to send delivery notice, recommended since adult signature is required)
• Add a printed gift message: add a free gift message for your gift card and email notice (240 characters). By entering a gift message, you indicate your order is a gift and we will withhold all price information from its contents.

Last Updated: 8/30/2010