Gifts for the Wine Lover Who Has Everything (That Aren’t Another Gadget)

The best gift for a wine lover is an experience or a reason to open something special. Not another accessory. They already own the corkscrew (probably three), the decanter, and the glasses nobody is allowed to put in the dishwasher. So most lists of gifts for the wine lover who has everything, which run about 30 gadgets long, are solving a problem they don’t have.

We didn’t come up with this on our own. Ask wine lovers on Reddit what they’d actually like to unwrap and the answer comes back almost the same every time: skip the bottle they could buy themselves, skip the gadget, and give them a dinner, a trip, or an excuse to finally open the good stuff. We happen to agree, and as a winery we can hand over most of that list ourselves.

This guide is for the person doing the buying. Maybe it’s your partner, your dad, or the boss who brings up Cabernet at every holiday party. Below you’ll find the experiences we’d give, one bottle that’s hard to find on a shelf, food that gets the good wine open, the three tools worth wrapping, and a few quirky ideas.

If you only take one idea from this post, take this one. The serious wine enthusiast in your life has bottles. What they rarely have is a free afternoon in wine country that someone else planned for them.

Root & Vine is the one we’d give. It’s a multi-course lunch, about 90 minutes long, served in our Enoteca, a private tasting salon tucked behind the Tasting Room at 1334 Vidovich Lane. Everyone’s seated. A host pours and talks you through the wines, and a chef serves each course tableside.

That part matters more than it sounds. When wine people describe their favorite gift, they keep coming back to meeting the people behind a bottle. Here they spend an hour and a half with the folks who pour, cook, and talk about our wines all day.

For something more casual, give a wine and food tasting at our Tasting Room at 709 Main Street in St. Helena. It’s walkable and relaxed, and it pairs nicely with a day of wandering around town. Grab lunch from our food truck while you’re there and you’ve planned a whole Saturday.

If they live in Boston or Denver or anywhere a Napa weekend isn’t happening soon, bring the tasting to them. We ship our wine and snacks from the farm kitchen to their door, then one of our wine educators leads a live, hour-long tasting on Zoom.

It works for a couple, a family spread across three time zones, or a group of old friends. Email virtual@cliffamily.com to set one up, and give yourself at least three weeks so the box arrives in time. For the holidays, give yourself more.

Wine lovers on Reddit name it as their own fallback, and they’re right. A Clif Family gift card lets the person with very particular taste pick for themselves. It arrives by email, which also makes it the best last-minute save we know.

A luxury gift for someone who loves wine is a bottle with a story they can’t find at the shop down the street. It doesn’t have to be the most expensive thing on your list. It has to come from somewhere.

Ours is the 2022 Croquet Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s a single-vineyard wine, meaning every grape comes from one site instead of a blend of vineyards. That site is a steep slope at 1,785 feet on the north side of Howell Mountain, planted in red clay that makes the vines work hard for water. It’s named for the croquet court on the property. Our winemaker, Laura Barrett, pulls the best barrels for this bottling each year.

In the glass you’ll get ripe plum, graphite, and chocolate, then a long finish of tart cherry. It has the structure to age, so they can open it this winter or hold it for an anniversary a few years out. Either way, they’ll know exactly where it came from.

If you’re still deciding on a bottle for someone else on your list, our guide to the best wine to give as a gift covers every budget and situation.

Every wine lover has a bottle they’re saving. Usually they’re waiting for an occasion good enough to deserve it. You can be the occasion.

Great food is what gets the good bottle off the rack. A couple of thick steaks and a jar of our Red Wine Somm Seasoning will get a Cabernet Sauvignon out of the cellar by dinnertime. Some other ideas from our farm:

• The Somm Seasoning Trio. Three  wine-friendly seasonings, one each for red, white, and rosé, made with spices from our friends at Burlap & Barrel.
• A Taste of Mangia! Our small-batch food gift set, with things like rosemary almonds and pistachios roasted with orange zest. Very good next to a glass of red wine.
• Preserves, olive oil, and nut mixes. Browse our artisan foods and build them a cheese board or charcuterie board kit. We wrote up how to build a wine, cheese & jam board if you want a blueprint.

Want the reason to open to keep showing up? A Cab Drop membership sends Cabernet on a schedule, all year. Our wine subscription gift guide explains how gifting one works.

Is a wine accessory a good gift for a wine expert? Usually not. They’ve had years to buy what they like. Still, there are a few tools that wine people actually use and rarely buy for themselves.

• A Coravin. It pours wine through the cork with a thin needle, then fills the space with argon gas, so the rest of the bottle stays fresh. If your person likes one glass of something great on a Tuesday night, they’ll use this constantly.
• A two-prong opener. Old corks crumble. A two-prong opener slides down the sides of the cork and eases it out in one piece. The Durand, which pairs a corkscrew with two prongs, is the one collectors swear by.
• Better glassware than they’d buy themselves. A pair of really nice wine glasses feels like a treat because most of us won’t splurge on them for ourselves.

Past those three, we’d skip it. Aerators, foil cutters, chillers, and novelty corkscrews tend to end up in a drawer. If your person still loves wine accessories, our wine lover’s accessory gift guide has the full rundown.

Some gifts are just fun. These still feel like you were paying attention.

• A wine map of Napa Valley. Frame one for their wall and circle Howell Mountain and St. Helena so they know where to go next.
• A blind tasting night. Wrap two bottles in paper bags, add a couple of scorecards, and let them guess. Try our 2022 Croquet against Kit’s Killer Cab and see who can pick the mountain wine.
• A happy hour in a box. Our Napa Valley Happy Hour set has two wines and the snacks that go with them. Hand it over with a blanket and they’ve got a picnic.

If you know the five-gift rule (something they want, something they need, something to wear, something to read), it works for wine people too. Give a bottle they want, a Coravin they need, an apron to wear on steak night, and a map to read. Then add a seat at the table in St. Helena.

Ask a wine lover about their favorite bottle and you’ll usually hear about where they drank it and who was there. At Clif Family, that’s the part we care about most, whether it happens at our table in St. Helena or at theirs with a jar of jam from our farm. We’d love to be in their next story.

Cheers.