Hello lovely reader! This might potentially be a rather odd time to be telling you our Plonk plans, given we’re already over a month through the year, but January was uncharacteristically jam-packed for the wine trade!

Either way, we’re thrilled you’re here reading our little pats on the back from recent times, and can’t wait to share some exciting updates with you for what we have planned this year to ensure your experience with Plonk continues to deliver a curated experience in wine not seen elsewhere in the UK.

Wine quiz – tailoring wine to your tastes

Last year saw us launch our very own wine quiz. Don’t worry, it wasn’t to test your knowledge (a daunting prospect given the complexities of wine – something we are fighting the good fight on demystifying with every box of wine we send!). Oh no, our wine quiz was devised as a short series of questions to discover your specific tastes in wine, and then ensure that you can receive wines straight to your door every month that are therefore tailored exactly to your preferred likes.

We like to think of it as stress-free wining. The perfect harmony of tech and a wine expert’s human touch. Why spend time fretting over what to choose, when someone else can nail it for you every time?!

Curated wine subscriptions

Wine subscriptions are nothing new to the UK wine market. But as with the industry as a whole, and the rather generic bottles that to this day still adorn many shelves and websites, so many wine subscriptions out there were therefore, as you might expect, rather generic as well. A bit too “one size fits all”.

Wine is so subjective though, and is really the antithesis of a blanket approach. So, having talked extensively with friends and family (we can’t express how sick they are of us talking about wine subscriptions now…), and as many other people as we could find willing to converse with us, we now curate every subscription to each individual. Each box is literally hand-picked by our in-house sommelier - not the most efficient process, sure, but it’s the lengths we’re willing to go to get good wine out there that you’ll love!

With that, we now have plans this year to bring in even more elements to tailor your experience. This will be orientated around a ‘Plonk Portal’ (we’ll come up with a more catchy title in time, we hope…) where you can access a database of all your wines from previous monthly subscription boxes, re-order your favourites with just a couple of clicks, write your own notes about each wine, keep us up to date about the sorts of wines you’d like your boxes to be steered towards going forward, and create a community chat with other subscribers so we can collectively demystify and drink better wine at affordable prices, all the time.

More pallets for your palate

Throughout this year, as we did in 2022, we’ll continue to scour the French landscape for great wines that you’ll rarely find across the UK. Plus it means we don’t have to pay for importer margins, so you get hard-to-come-by wine at great value.

Why such a heavy focus on France you ask? Well, other than France still being the epicentre for great wines at affordable prices, the fact there is such a long history in winemaking and therefore and an incredible base of knowledge, this is now giving way to swathe of more sustainable winemaking practices being enlisted – an absolute must for Plonk and our ethos around wine. Which leads us nicely into…

Sustainability

This is by no means a new area for us. Sustainability in wine has been central to our business since its inception, choosing to only work with winemakers who operate in an environmentally conscious manner. Thankfully our small-batch producers are already attuned to environmental challenges, and we will continue to work with them to ensure the winemaking process is as sustainable as possible. We have also used 100% recyclable packaging used from the outset, and provide carbon neutral deliveries from our warehouse to your door.

Further to this, our continued work with predominantly French and western European winemakers will be ever-present. Reducing mileage on how far wine travels is one of the most vital ways in which we can reduce emissions in the industry. We are also accruing information from our producers on the weight of their bottles used, as lighter bottles could reduce emissions up to an estimated 30% per bottle.

We will continue to seek out ways to reduce our environmental impact in 2023 and beyond, and plan to use our platform with wineries and the broader wine community to make sure that sustainability remains a top priority for the industry. In this way, you can then rest assured that your choice in wine is doing more than its bit for the environment.

Supper clubs

The combination of food and wine is an experience rarely bettered. We have loved collaborating with like-minded operators in the supper club spheres to further accentuate the qualities of both areas in which we work, and to deliver unrivalled gastronomic experiences. Keep your eyes peeled on our Instagram, or sign up to our newsletter, to be kept abreast of upcoming supper clubs we’ll be collaborating with. There you can enjoy Plonk wines with a group of people who you know are great because they know that good wine and food are also great.

Thank you for reading this and for accompanying us on our journey to bring small-batch wine and curated wine experiences to the UK. It honestly means so much to us. Much love x