The Best Wine Delivery Services of 2021

Wine delivered to your doorstep in as little as an hour

Written by
Céline Bossart
Celine Bossart is a New York-based freelance journalist and photographer specializing in wine and spirits.
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Céline Bossart
Published 12/23/20

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Bottle of wine and glasses on table

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The Best Wine Delivery Services of 2021

Wine has joined the growing list of items that are regularly delivered to homes throughout the United States. The convenience of using a wine delivery service is the main draw, but it can also be a great way to support local businesses.

Whether you're simply looking for a few bottles from the grocery store or are interested in sprucing up your collection with some harder-to-find wines, there's an option out there that will suit your needs. We evaluated the best wine delivery services out there that allow you to spend less time at the store and more time at home.

Best Overall: Vivino

Vivino

Vivino

Vivino is an essential app for any wine lover, even if just for its label scanning feature, which allows you to take a photo of any bottle to quickly learn about the wine’s flavor profile and average price as well as reviews from fellow database users. There are about 48 million Vivino users, each of whom contributes to the app’s unique insights on who’s drinking and buying what at any given time. Essentially, this is a super easy-to-use wine library that doubles as a massive online retailer, complete with a jury of your peers to help steer you in the right direction in terms of what to drink now and what to buy for later, whether you’re in an actual wine store or buying through Vivino.

You can also shop via Vivino’s website, which provides a more spacious interface for users to browse wines by category—think affordable reds and whites, bestselling bottles in your area, special offers, and more. Either way, you can use Vivino to search for bottles by the label, region, grape(s), pairing capabilities, price, and user rating, which translates to a hyper-personalized shopping experience. Just be aware that some merchants require a bottle minimum for certain wines, which is something to consider while you’re loading up your cart. Shipping is available to all states across the country, but note that the selection itself varies by state depending on liquor laws and regulations. Shipping costs also vary.

Best On-Demand: Instacart

Instacart

Instacart

This grocery and bottle delivery service truly makes you feel like you’re stepping into the store yourself, making your selections based on the best brands and deals available and choosing alternative options as necessary (you can select a specific substitution for items in your cart, have your shopper choose for you, or have them refund the item altogether if it’s not in stock). In terms of selection, you can choose from a handful of different participating shops in your area, each of which will offer pickup, delivery, or both. There are various fees based on delivery timing (e.g., same-day delivery) as well as the total purchase cost. Heavy items will incur an additional fee.

If you think you’ll use Instacart regularly, you can join Instacart Express for $9.99 per month, which grants free same-day delivery on orders over $35 and a discounted service fee. There's a small fee added to orders with alcohol, although that is also reduced for Express members. It sounds like a lot of fees, and they can certainly add up if you stack them, but shopping wisely and maximizing your grocery and/or booze orders makes the convenience of using Instacart well worth it.

Best by-the-Glass: Usual Wines

Usual Wines

Usual Wines

If you’re drawn to pretty packaging and prefer your wine bottles in a single-serving format, Usual Wines is an ideal option for you—and it makes a great gift too. You can choose from a variety of bottles, each of which holds 6.3 ounces of wine—a very healthy pour—made from sustainably farmed California grapes and without the addition of sugar or sulfites.

Among Usual Wines' offerings are a red, rosé, brut sparkling, brut sparkling rosé, and a limited edition 2016 reserve Cabernet Sauvignon as well as a canned guava spritz. When you shop from the core collection (red, rosé, and brut sparkling), you’ll choose from a one-time purchase of either six, 12, 18, or 24 glasses (12 or 24 for mixed packs), or you can subscribe for monthly deliveries of your selected quantity for a 17 percent discount with a minimum commitment of two months. Most of the boxes above the six-glass option include shipping and all boxes are sent via UPS or FedEx. Usual Wines does not ship to several states, so check that list on its website before starting your order.

Best Value: Saucey

Saucey

Saucey

Saucey is a Los Angeles-based booze delivery service that caters to its home base as well as other major areas across the country, including Dallas, Miami, New York City, Orlando, Chicago, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Jacksonville, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington, D.C., to name a few. One of Saucey’s main draws is its promise to never charge you a membership or delivery fee or require an order minimum.

With this service, you can shop spirits, wines, beers, and cocktail accouterments from one streamlined selection based on your location as opposed to shopping from local stores, each with its own minimum, on other shopping platforms. The best part is that you can have your order delivered in as little as 30 minutes, which is the most impressive delivery window of all of the on-demand liquor delivery services we’ve seen or tested. You also can easily send a gift to someone else in the form of a bottle or a Saucey gift card via the website’s gift tab.

Best Extension: Sippd

Sippd

Sippd

If you’ve ever dreamed of having a personal sommelier button right on your browser window, Sippd is your answer. Downloading the free Chrome extension gives you access to a broad wine database powered by Wine.com that shows you which bottles best suit your palate and how to pair them, all while enabling you to order in just a few clicks.

Sippd uses a personalized scoring system of 1–100. The higher the number, the better the match. Once you’ve tasted your wines, you can go back to Sippd and rate them to help inform your future personalized picks. The catch is that you’ll have to rate three wines you’ve tasted in the past before the extension can do its thing, so this might not be the best option for those who don’t quite know how they feel about their past experiences with wine. However, it’s a perfect opportunity to experiment in order to discover and broaden your palate.

When you’ve found your match, purchasing is a relatively simple process. From within the Sippd extension, just click the price button and it’ll take you straight to the bottle page on Wine.com, where you can load up your cart. Delivery fees at Wine.com can be steep, but if you join the StewardShip club for $49, you'll get free delivery for a year.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Wine Delivery Service?

A wine delivery service is an app, online retailer, or third-party service that brings bottles to your doorstep, often in as little as 30 minutes. For example, if you’re making an elaborate meal for two at home and realize you’re down to your last bottle of wine, simply head to Saucey or Instacart to snag a few more while you continue your dinner prep. If you’ve got a bit more lead time, try Vivino to find your perfect matches and place an order for delivery in just a few days.

What Are the Advantages of Using a Wine Delivery Service vs. Going to the Local Liquor Store?

The selection is generally broader when you’re exploring your options online vs. shopping within the confines of a liquor store and its singular inventory—plus, you can more easily compare prices online than you can while shopping in-person (unless you don’t mind going to multiple stores prior to making a final decision).

Supporting small local businesses is always a good idea, and you can still do so by shopping with platforms like Saucey that work directly with brick-and-mortar shops to fulfill orders. It’s a win-win.

How We Chose the Best Wine Delivery Services

We evaluated the best wine delivery services based on cost, availability, ease of use, customer reviews, and more to come up with our list. Wine delivery services come in many forms, from third-party, on-demand delivery apps like Saucey to a more traditional e-commerce platform like Wine.com. Whichever option you choose, you’ll be sipping great wine in no time, all without having to set foot outside.

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