Wine in a Test Tube

We’ve said it before: subscription services for single products are hot. Think chocolate, fish and sausage subscriptions. Now there’s also a one-person wine subscription. Sent in test tubes.

It could well be that Saint Nicholas and Santa Claus will be handing out subscriptions for food and/or drinks this year. Very convenient for the foodie who already has everything. Whose kitchen is overflowing with rarely used gadgets. In any case, a foodie prefers a gift that has been completely digested within a few hours.

Wine, good idea

Wine is always a good idea. There are therefore various wine subscriptions. But since many of us want to consume less alcohol, an entire bottle of wine is sometimes simply too much. Especially if one person wants red and the other white or rosé. Or if you drink alone. Because why not?

And when you consider that more than 350 million litres of wine go down the drain in Europe alone every year, Vino Vitro has a solution. Namely, a subscription to wines from all over the world in test tubes containing exactly the amount of one glass—the official standard of 10 centilitres.

A faux-wooden case with three test tubes of wine.

Handy, because this way you can also try out a wine. A monthly subscription delivers a faux-wooden case with 3 test tubes of 10 cl for between €38 and €109, depending on the number of points the wines in question scored with the world’s most notorious wine critic, the American Robert Parker.

Bacchus subscription

With a discovery subscription (€38), you receive wines Parker has not yet discovered; the connoisseur package contains tubes of wine that scored 85 points or more (Parker awards scores between 50 and 100). The Bacchus subscription guarantees legendary wines with scores of +90.

Let’s do the maths: 3 tubes of 10cl is 30cl in total, for between €38 and €109. A whole bottle is 75cl. That comes to €95 for the entry-level wine, up to no less than €272.50 for a Bacchus wine. And the latter therefore works out at well over €90 per glass/tube.

Our €55 connoisseur box included, among other things, 10cl of Sanctuary Sauvignon Blanc 2015, which sells online for around €45 per bottle, as well as 10cl of The Chocolate Block 2015 from Franschhoek in South Africa, which costs a few dozen euros per bottle. You do get tasting notes and food-pairing suggestions from a well-known sommelier (it is not known who), and you can also have the tubes personalised. But the cost probably just didn’t quite work out with a case made of real wood.

You can find more information about Vino Vitro’s wines by test tube here.